>> from Palo Alto, California It's the Cube covering the EM Where women transforming technology twenty nineteen. Brought to you by V. M. Where. >> Hi Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the end. Where. Palo Alto, California For the fourth Annual Women Transforming Technology Even W squared. Excited to welcome back to the Cube. Kathy Chou, VP of R and D. Operations and central services at work. Cappy. It's a pleasure to have you back. It's one of you will be back. So you and I saw each other this morning. Big hug. This is one of my favorite events to be at, and I'm proud to be here with the cute because this this authentic community of women is unlike anything that I've really seen or felt in a long time. Fourth annual. I know it's grown over the last year. What do you What are some of your thoughts, even just walking in the doors this morning? Well, it's funny. It is the fourth annual and I I've been toe all four. The very first time I came, I was not a B M or employee, and I fell in love with the company. The campus because it was the very first time. And every single time I come to one of these events, I either meet someone or multiple people better fantastics or learn multiple things that will help me do what I need to do and I will tell you, and I'm not just saying cause you're here. But last year when I met you, I just felt like there was an instant spark. And like you say at these conferences, don't you feel it's safe? You can. You could be authentic. You could be who you want to be. You could be vulnerable, right? And as we can learn with each other, we can share what we need to work on. You move on and we can also Peter chests a little bit right for stuff that we've done well that sharing is so critical. Eye all the women that I've spoken to today we look at even our own career. Trajectories are looking at a lot of the statistics of the loan numbers that women technology where where is the attrition happening? What's happening in and grade school in middle school when girls, you know between seven and twelve years old, way have to help each other build up cos it's just and I think there's no better >> way than sharing stories and cheer point that means being vulnerable. I think vulnerability is one of the best price you can exhibit, period. But it used truly conceit and feel the impact Hearing. >> As you've said, you've seen that over the last four years that this is really an authentic community in every >> sense of the word. Absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned quite a few things that I'd like to talk about. So first, is these >> young. Let's start first with diversity. Okay, I know a lot of people do talk aboutthe. They think of gender diversity or ethnic diversity. Diversity of the capital. >> Dia's much broader, right? It's okay. Diversity of experience, education, you know, geography, seniority, right. There's all different types of diversity. But if we do hope, focus in a little bit on young girls. Right? Because you think about that. I was just in the I wish conference in Cork, Ireland. Stop back. Yeah. And what was amazing about that was so this is all of Court County. They had all of the what they called secondary school girls every single one of them for two days at this conference. But they got to listen to speakers from all over the world to give them that confidence to stay in, because statistics are when they're in primary school or middle school. Right? Girls say I want to be a computer scientist. I wantto do this techie thing. I'm gonna do Sam with them when they go to high school there, given all these messages like, you can't do it and you don't look like a computer scientist, right? And then all of a sudden it gets It becomes because in her head and it really does affect our confidence. And then, sad to say, years and years ago, when I graduated from college, there was only nine percent of the women were mechanical engineers. Sad to say today, that number is not challenged much. Do something just conferences like these that give us the courage to be better mentors and sponsors of those that will come after us. >> I agree. I think that it's and in some cases it seems like it's so simple where we make I don't think we're making this so hard, but I think that having the opportunity of a community to just have okay like minded people in terms of experiences that they shared well, how did you get through this barrier of, for example, you know, really kind of dissecting to your point diversity with a capital B. There's so many layers to that. What does that mean? How do we achieve it? I mean, if you look at a lot of the statistics companies that have you say females, uh, on the executive staff are like twenty seven percent more profitable. Yes, the amount of oven of reinvesting of income that women do back into the community. Their family's one of the things, Joy said this morning in her keynote joyful Fulham. We need him saying that, >> right? So is it looking at women and people of color as the underrepresented majority that that was absolutely spot on? I absolutely >> thought it was spot on this well, and you know, if you think about it, think about these experiences. You know again about diversity. There's a new dawn. It's a new phrase. But intersectionality is the word, which means, you know Okay, you're a woman. I'm a woman. I'm an Asian woman, But I'm also a woman that lived on the East Coast. I went to these sorts of schools. I had these types of experiences. So what it means is everyone bring something to the table. So if you really think about diversity now, we'LL hear this talk about inclusion. That's kind of the big word. And I've I've actually witnessed this myself on my own team because if you look at my direct staff on paper, when you look at them, they look very diverse. But actually diversity. That's like the tip of the iceberg. What you see is only the little piece when you bring down, get to those deeper layers. You realize, >> really how diverse team Miss Wright of spiritual >> diversity, experiential all of that and by including and created a inclusive environment were able to get the most out of diversity. And I think that's how you do it, because I thought about this. When you single out groups, you're not being inclusive, right? That's a good point. So I think the goal is to get what we can call the model. What we think is the majority, which is the minority to embrace the underrepresented majority and >> your perspective? How do you think V m? Where is doing on that? I was talking with Betsy said earlier, and some other folks and learned that the eggs I don't know how far down this goes, but at least execs are actually their bonuses are related to our tied to diversity and inclusion. That's a huge kind of bold statement that a company like the Mars making, not just to the tech industry, but every industry. Where do you think the emperor is on this journey of really identifying diversity and inclusion and actually starting to realise the positive impact? >> Yes. So first of all, I think you said something earlier. This is a It's an epidemic situation. OK, in that I do tell me, almost in every industry, there isthe right entertainment manufacturing, high tech, legal, professional, whatever way, there's an issue with diversity, and you're absolutely right. The peace and above our bonuses air tied to diversity, inclusion the awareness of the, um, where is second of them. The interesting thing is, there's no silver bullet. If it were that easy, we would've solved it. So what? It iss. It's one of those things where I say it takes a village and it's little things like talk about inclusion earlier, right? Hey, when you have a meeting, make sure everyone's voices voices are heard. Doesn't matter who it is. I don't care if it's a woman and under represent minority or white male. It doesn't matter. You shouldn't it? It shouldn't right. Everyone should be heard. And I was just giving a breakout talk about when you increase. Inclusion will drive more innovation. And that's my job as a leader of six hundred folks in an RD organization is to create that culture that allows people to have confidence, to take risks, to be vulnerable, authentic and to innovate right and to do new things. And if I can create that culture of inclusion, it will drive those business results. >> I couldn't agree more Tell me about like since we spoke last year. I love that driving inclusion to drive innovation. What are some of the things that you've actually seen as outcomes? Maybe just for your team as well as your own expertise as a manager? >> Yes. So I've been with him where for two and a half years, and when I first came Basically my team was a compilation of three separate teams, so each of them traditional silo new themselves in their own style but did not understand the power of the team across. So at that time, no one team was greater than one hundred people. Okay, let's say now imagine a mighty force of six hundred strong marching in the same direction, trying to do things together. One of the things that we're trying to do is start to build platforms across our organization. And what are the commonalities? That that's the difference is what commonalities across our teams so that we can drive that innovation much more effectively and efficiently. And so those are some of the things that we're doing have another fun story to tell me. Everything that I do to try to create an inclusive environment, just have opportunities for team members to meet each other. It's a simple assed. Hey, I don't know. Lisa. Lisa, what do you do? Oh, my gosh. I have a project that might need your help. I don't know how many times when we were working in the silos would enter calling someone outside our team to get the expert advice when it was on her own. And so we had one event when we had two people that sat next to each other. They didn't know each other at all. One needed some machine learning expertise. The other one was in machine learning enthusiast Fast. They came together. They have now built a patent pending piece of micro service called instead ML. That's so, uh, that's what happens when people when you're included >> and you think, Why is it so difficult? In some cases, technology is sort of sort of fuels that right because we get so used to being I could do everything from here >> on the phone from an airplane from the hotel from home, from or ever so we get more >> used to being less communicative. Absolutely right, Tio. Let's actually let's let's go back to the olden days where there were, You know, there was no device and phoniness and actually have a conversation because to your point, suddenly are uncovering. Oh my gosh. All of these skill sets are here. What if we did nothing for years? >> You're speaking my language. Eso You're absolutely right. But there's this. They used to be this rule that's a new one you wanted to communicate to someone. You have to tell them something seven times, >> right, because they're busy doing other times on the age of social media, they say. Now it's eleven times. Oh, great. And how I got exactly. So how often have you seen people who are sitting like this and they're >> communicating with each other? Be attacks and they're sitting right here. Why, it's >> important to go back old school. By the way, I think I'm old school. >> Whenever I want to pick up the phone, talk to my kids. It's on the phone. I don't care if they're, uh, ready for me to talk >> to her, and I just called them. It's because when you're innovating, it's not just the mind, it's the heart. >> And when you catch those human relationships, right is what makes the innovation stick. It makes you want to do more. It makes you want to achieve greater heights. Then you would have cause you're invested. You see, when it's an academic exercise, it's like check the box. But when you're invested in your hearts and you I feel like I can't let Lisa down, believe me, you're going to get more in depth and more advanced innovation. >> So with that and kind of the empathy approach in love to get your perspectives on a I, we talk about it all the time at every event that we go to on the Cube globally. And there's different schools of thought. Aye, aye is fantastic. It's phenomenal. It's it's becoming new standard, even a baby boomers known to some degree what it is. Yes, then there's the It's taking jobs away yet, But he's going to create new jobs. Yes, and there's the whole ethics behind this morning. Joy really kind of showed us a lot of the models and facial recognition at big companies that are better being built with bias. But one of the things I think that I hear resoundingly at events is it's going to be a combination of humans and machines. Yes, because machines can learn a lot. But it's that heart that you just mentioned in that empathy that comes from the human. So do you see those two as essential forces coming together is a. I continues to grow and take over the world. >> It's essential. Like you say. Technology is very How do we sit? Neutral. Okay, If you put it in front of a bad actor, it becomes bad. If you put it in front of a good actor, it becomes good. Okay, so technology is neutral, right? So now the goal is how do >> we ensure that we Khun tamp down the bad actors, people who want to use it for bad? And >> by the way, I am a fundamental believer that there are some jobs that should be automated. >> I mean, come on, some of the And by the way, things >> in the health industry. When you have big data and you've got a lot of things, you have to process a lot of information so we could be more accurate on things. Um, there other examples of if it's not in check, it can go right, right. Where will Over reliance on machines. Unfortunately, the seven. Thirty seven max eight is an example of it being too smart, right, and that >> you needed the human to actually adjust. So now I think also kind of combining a lot of the topics that we talked about. We need to train our children to understand that this technology is here to stay and with each and every one of them, how can they take that wonderful technology and use it for good? And I think that's the whole that's peace around inclusion. That's the peace around, building confidence in these young people and being examples. And so we need more people like joy out there so that she can. She has now raised this flag up saying, Hey, did you realize this >> happen? We need more young people. By the way, she's very young person. I'm >> totally impressed with what she's been able to do in here great for years, very, very inspiring. But if we all did a >> little bit of what joy did, we could change the world. >> Absolutely. The accountability factor and the social responsibility is so important. I was impressed with her on many levels, but one of them was the impact that she's already making with with Microsoft, IBM, uh, and actually starting to impact facial recognition a. I based on the research that she's done and show them Hey, you've got some problems here. So she's She's kind of at that intersection of your point neutral technology, good actors, bad actors. Maybe it's not good or bad. It's just Well, this is the data that we have. And it's training the models to do this. Oh, the but the accountability in the responsibility that it appears that a Microsoft and IBM face plus plus and even Amazon that she said, Hey, guys, look at how far off your models are. It sounds like these companies are actually starting to take some accountability. Civility for >> that? Yes, well, I think she proved it in our talk because last year, right, the numbers were in the eighty eighty percent tiles, and now they're up to ninety five. So you know, she's saying, by kind >> of being that lightning rod on this issue, one person could make this amount of change. Imagine if all was just a fraction of what she did, right? I mean, I think, and again, I feel very because I'm older and I have my own children just inspiring this generation, too. We could build up more joys in this world. >> So you have four boys. Yes. How are you inspiring them to finally become good humans, but also to look at the technology, the opportunities that it creates to be inclusive why it's important that some of the lessons that even parted on your boys >> Yes, first of all, I've one thing that's really >> important to me is I want them to accept whoever their partner will be for whatever they want to do. So if their partner wants to stay home and then you support them, if they want to work and go, do you support them? But just be supportive, be that partner, whatever that is, that's really important. >> The other thing is, I think just >> my husband and I are excellent examples of how that isthe, because he's an orthodontist and I've got a busy high tech job. I'm traveling a lot. My husband does more than his fair share of the household duties, and we split things pretty evenly. So I hope they've seen witness. It's not just talk, it's action and that this can actually work. And fortunately, I'm >> boys are a little older now because if you begin in the beginning, I thought, Oh, working. I don't >> know how these boys are going to turn out right, but three of them are college age and older, and they really turned into some fantastic children. The youngest is on his path as well as a junior in high school. And, you know, and I also see the type of friends that they make and how they treat women and other people that are different from them, and it just makes me very proud. >> Think the world needs more? Kathy Chow's I really dio Are you going off to see Ashley Judd? Her? What? Some of the things that you're looking >> forward to hearing her talking. Well, it's funny. I just came from a VP session. She is I again. You see someone right on the screen and you see him as an actor and you heard about Time's up and her speech and that sort of thing. But way had, but how were we just answered? Questions. She is so thoughtful, so connected, so well spoken communicates in a way that really touches you. She's another one of those lightning rides. I think w t, too, didn't excellent job of getting English speakers this year. Uh, and it's very different from joy. It's much more from a from her view, in her mind went in arts, and Joyce was much more from a technical aspect. But messages are the same, right? It's to be inclusive, understanding, embrace diversity and be authentic. You >> inclusive animators. Kathy is so great to have you back on the Cube. And Charlie, I know we could keep chatting, but we thank you so much of your time. We can't wait for next year. Wait. Excellent. Thank you for the Cuban Lisa Martin. You're >> watching the show from women Transforming Technology, fourth annual somewhere. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From the VMware Campus in Palo Alto, California It's the CUBE. Covering Women Transforming Technology >> I'm Lisa Martin with the CUBE and we are on the ground in Palo Alto at VMware headquarters with the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Excited to be speaking with Kathy Chou, the VP of R&D Operations and Central Services from VMware. Kathy, nice to meet you. >> Nice to meet you, as well. >> So, third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Sold out within hours. It was standing room only in the keynote this morning. We got to hear from Laila Ali. So inspiring. What a strong female, who used the word purpose a lot during her talk this morning. You're a mom of four boys. You've been a female in tech for a long time, now. What is it that has kept you in tech and pursuing a career in technology as a leader? >> Well, I have been in tech for over 25 years. And it has been an absolute amazing journey. From early career to mid career to now, I'm going to say mid-to-late career, it's just a passion that's I've had. When I was a young girl, I was just good at math and science. And I pursued that passion and ended up with a mechanical engineering degree. And there are many steps along the way where I was getting discouraged. "Why do you want to do this tech thing? "You should maybe drop out, do something else." But I'm so glad I stuck with it. And really, as you mentioned, the four boys. I want to be an example for my sons because I want them to understand there can be women with all sorts of talents. And if they happen to find someone who is technical and wants to do something in this world or do something in hi-tech or management or whatever that is, that they support them in every way, shape, or form. >> How have you gotten the coveted or sought-after work-life balance? What are some of you tips and tricks we can learn from? >> Well, first of all, I call it work-life integration. Because it's really not a balance. You've got to integrate it. And one of the things I've also ... First thing, I've chosen companies that really believe in that. VMware is a company that really believes in this bringing your authentic self to work and making sure that you can integrate your work with your life. And you need to have that balance. In fact, I do a career journey. And when I talk about my career journey, there's above line, below line. And above the line is the work stuff, and below the line is the life stuff. And you need to make sure that they're equally full. Because I believe that if you have a very, very full and busy life outside of work, it'll actually make you a better employee. So I encourage my folks, as a leader now, I'm finally a leader and I manage a team, that if folks have to go and do something in the middle of the day, doctor's appointment, do something with the kid, go do it. Because as long as you get your job done, you can integrate both work and life. >> Lisa: I love that. I think you're absolutely right, that it isn't about ... It's integration. They have to work together. So, from your career in mechanical engineering, what were some of the things that ... Were you just sort of born with an innate, "I'm really interested in this," in terms of keeping your head down and focused and getting into a fairly male-dominated industry and field? Was it just sort of that innate, that you were born with, "Hey I like this. "Yeah, I'm in a male-dominated field, but I don't care?" >> Yeah, it kind of was. Because, you know, my love ... So I had two focus areas in mechanical engineering. One was material science. I just loved material science. And so I ended up working for my first job out of Stanford was Instron Corporation which was a materials testing firm. My other love was robotics. So, I had actually worked for GM on the production line and helped program some of those early robots. And so, I was able to combine those two passions when I ended up going to Instron and developed their robotics line. Now, here's the thing. As I'm going through all of this, am I looking around and realizing, "My goodness, there are no other females here?" That was the case. But my passion for learning new things, and doing something, and making a difference seemed to outstrip the fact that there weren't females. And now that, as I'm getting, again, more advanced in my career, I'm realizing that I have a duty to play as a role-model to say "Hey, you can do it. "You can have a family. "You can have a great job. "You can have a great life outside of work. "You know, as long as you integrate all of those things." So I think with that perseverance, that's how you can get through. >> And I think that there is such a need for those role models because like we were talking about Laila Ali this morning who clearing was born with this natural confidence, which not a lot of women are, >> Kathy: Yes. >> Not a lot of people are, in general. So, I think it's really important that you've recognized you're in this position to be a mentor. >> Kathy: Mm hmm. >> What are some of the ... How do you advise, either women that are in their early stage careers or even those maybe in the middle of their careers that are pondering, "Hey, I don't see any "or a lot of strong female leaders "in the executive suite. "Should I stay here?" You had that internally, but what is your advise to women who might be at that crossroads. >> Yeah. I think the first and most important thing is that it takes courage to stay the course. I know that sounds a little odd, but don't care about what you see around yourself, right? Just know about what do you love? What is your passion? And, you know, I always say that there is something I call the sweet spot. It's where your passion meets your talent. And if you're in a place like that, you're in a very special place. Because that means it's a strength of yours that you also love. And if you do that, it doesn't matter who else is around you. You know, one thing Laila said that I really loved and I really, really believe in myself is preparation. You have to be prepared so as long as you are prepared that's what gives you the confidence. We don't ... Okay, maybe she was born confident. She came out of the womb confident. I certainly wasn't. I was someone who grew up with ... I really lacked a lot self confidence. I was painfully shy. I had trouble speaking in front of people. I worked very, very hard. I was prepared to get over that fear. You know, I put myself ... She mentioned this thing about being uncomfortable. And I think I put myself in a lot of uncomfortable situations as well. I was really resonating with what she said. Speaking in front of large audiences. In fact, I used to memorize a lot of my speeches and then I remember I would forget it in the middle of it and- (gasp) I would be horrified. But you know what? You do a few of those things, you get better and better at it and if you just get out of that comfort zone and you have those little butterflies. I always say if you have those little butterflies, you're stretching your learning and that's what helps you achieve. >> I couldn't agree more. I think that, you know, I think that I always say, "Get comfortably uncomfortable." >> Kathy: Yeah. >> No matter what you're doing. If it's above the line or below the line as you were saying before. But you're right, she talked about preparation, being prepared and we talk a lot about imposter syndrome. >> Kathy: Mm hmm. >> Often times at Women and Technology events, just because it comes up, it's something I didn't even know what it was until a few years ago. And I think just simply finding out that this is a legitimate issue that many people face of any industry, gender, you name it. That alone, knowing that that was legitimate, was, "Okay, I'm not alone here." But if you can go, "Let me prepare and get prepared for what I need to do." That preparation part is, I think, a huge key that, if more people understand that just work and be prepared, you're not alone in feeling that. Sort of maybe setting the level setting there. I think that can go a long way to helping those women in any stage of their career just get that little bit more courage that you said. >> Yes. >> That you need to get out of that comfort zone. And I agree I think goals that make you a little nervous, are good goals to have. >> Totally agree. I have some tips on how to get out of that comfort zone, Or get out of your comfort zone. So, I find, okay, there's always the smartest-person-in-the-room thing you hear about, and, forget about that, okay? Ask questions. You always here this: There's no such thing as a dumb question. And there really is no such thing. I know how many times someone has asked a question say, "I asked that question." >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> And actually it's a brilliant way to be heard. Because a lot of times, a lot of women ... Actually, it doesn't matter. A woman, unrepresented minority, it could be a white male who's shy, right? In an inclusive environment, if you don't speak up, you're not heard. And a lot of the brilliant things that people have, are those questions that people have. Because if they don't understand something, I'm sure there's someone else who doesn't either. And so if you just ask some questions, you'll find that you'll get that courage to ask a few more. And then eventually you get to the point where you actually can advocate. >> I agree. You have to be willing to try and I love that. So, the theme of this event, Inclusion in Action. >> Kathy: Yes. >> I'd love to get your perspective on how do you see inclusion in action here at VMware in engineering, for example in R&D. >> Yes. First of all, I'm on the Diversity and Inclusion Council. So I represent R&D. Yes, I just had a meeting with Betsy Sutter. We had our Diversity and Inclusion Council for VMware so I was representing R&D. So it's something that is very, very important to us. One thing I will say that I've learned at this conference is it's not about the stats. It's not about the fact that you have meetings or goals. It's something you must internalize. It's something, as a leader, I think it's my job and duty to exude it, you know, through example, through being inclusive, to making sure, like I was at an event the other day here at VMware I was talking about I was at the Watermark Conference, and I was basically doing a replay of what I did at the Watermark Conference. And in there, I saw three men. And I said to myself, "You know what? "We need more men at this event." And so, even at this conference today, I want to see more men. It's all about inclusion, right? And I think people sometimes forget that, even though it says Women Transforming Technology, men, women, whatever your sexual orientation, whatever that is, we all care about how women can transform technology. You don't have to be a woman to do that. >> Right. Well one of the things that came out today was the great news about this massive investment that VMware is doing. 15 million to create this lab at Stanford. >> Kathy: Yeah. >> This innovation lab. And we were talking with Betsy earlier. And actually, in the press release, it cited that McKinsey report that states that, companies that have a more diverse executive team, >> Yes. no stats or anything, more diverse, are 21 percent more profitable. And it just seems like a no brainer. Every company wants to be profitable, right? Except for an NPO. So, if all you need to do is to increase that thought diversity alone and you're more profitable, why is this so difficult for so many other organizations to culturally adopt that mindset? >> Yeah. What I find fascinating is that diversity and inclusion is obviously a very hot topic in Silicon Valley, right? Every company is either fearing having their numbers publicly outputted or their working on these things. And yet we're doing a lot of things, but the needle isn't moving, right? So, I think it was mentioned today, by a professor from Stanford. She was saying there's not a silver bullet. Some of these things will take a long time. One of the things that we had talked about was this pipeline of, it doesn't matter again, young women, under-represented minorities, whatever you say in the STEM fields. We need to encourage more of that, okay? And so, what's interesting is there's more, well certainly more females than males that are graduating these days, yet, when you start off in a hi-tech company, you will see quite a bit of balance between male and female, I'll just use that as an example. It's even worse as far as under-represented minorities. But as you move up the chain, what happens is the numbers just fall off. And, one of the root causes that I see as an issue, is that when these women look up at the top and say, "I don't see women." Or if I am a person of color, "I don't see a person of color in this leadership position. "Why should I continue?" And then you see just a lot of attrition happening at those levels. And so, what it takes is every single one of us internalizing how important this is. And I think when that happens, when it's not a, "Oh, it's a project." Or, "Oh, it's an initiative." Or, "Oh, it's a goal." And this, by the way, may take a decade or more. But once we all internalize this, I think that's when the needle's going to move. >> Yeah, we talked a lot earlier about accelerating this. Because you're right, the attrition rates are incredibly high, much higher for women leaving technology than leaving other industries. And a lot of women are looking for those role models, like somebody like you for example. But, I think the more awareness, the more consistent awareness we can get ... And also the fact that, you know, in the last six months we've had the Me Too Movement explode onto the scene, getting this unlikely alliance with Hollywood, Time's Up, Brotopia coming out a couple of months ago, and was something that I actually put off reading because I thought, "I don't think I want to know", and I thought, "Actually, yes I do." Because there's no reason that these things should continue. >> Right. >> But, to your point, it's not just about getting more women involved. It's really about integrating and including everybody. >> Kathy: Absolutely. >> To move the needle, but much faster. Half of 2018 is almost over. There were no big females onstage for CES five months ago. And there's really no reason for that. So the more we can all come together and just identify role models and examples and share the different things that we've been through, the more I think we can impact this acceleration of this movement. >> Totally agree. I actually have a thought that you just triggered around perhaps accelerating this in the best way we can. Knowing, again, there's no silver bullet. But I was at my business school reunion and I was shocked to see that 80 percent of my business school graduates were not working. And what happened is many of these women had taken jobs in consulting firms, investment banking firms, that weren't that friendly. And when they started to have children, they stopped out. And they didn't want to compromise their family. Who does? Nobody wants to do that. But when they wanted to come back, they found that they had either gotten off, they call it the mommy track, right? The train left the station, they couldn't make it back on. Or they weren't willing to take a lower job. And so, because of that, many of them ended up not working. And, you know, that's sad. Because these are really, really smart, brilliant ... >> Lisa: These are Harvard graduates, right? >> They are. Harvard Business School graduates that were not working. And so, like you said, it requires everyone to understand, right? It's the employers, a lot of these men, need to understand that women, if they want ... And by the way, it's not even women these days. It's young men who want to be with their families, as well. Paternity leaves, time off with the kids, those sorts of things. If you allow those people that freedom. You know, when I was young, I felt like I went through this by myself. So I had three kids five and under. My career was not progressing. I was just doing lateral moves and I didn't feel like I was successful in anything. Not successful in my job, not successful at home. And then I had no friends, 'cause I was too busy and work and home. But if I had more of a support network at the time, fortunately I didn't drop out. I could have. I think many people do. So, if we can provide more support at that really important time when they're raising their families, people can see that, "Hey, I can have a great family life and also a great work life." >> So key, just for support alone. And that's one of the things that I think is really exciting about Women Transforming Technology. It's this consortium of organizations and industry and academia and non-profits, coming together to identify and tackle these issues that we're facing. 'Cause the issues that women are facing are issues that corporations, profitable corporations, are facing. But to connect on these challenge points, provide that support and that network, and also, to your point, maybe even providing an unlikely mentor to somebody who might have in your position where, "I don't think I'm being successful anywhere." But you stuck with it, and you might have at times gone, "I don't know why I'm sticking with this." But you had some intestinal fortitude to do that. More of those supportive and mentoring voices and people, the more we can elevate them, and show them to other people who might be struggling, the better we're going to be able to move this needle. >> Completely agree. And you know what? They always say "it takes a village," right? It takes a village to raise a family. It takes a village to work and do what you need to do and make a change in the world, and we all need to do this together. And, by the way, there's nothing more inclusive than that, is there? >> Lisa: Right. >> We all have to deal with this. It doesn't matter your sexual orientation, your age, your gender, your ethnicity, doesn't matter. We all share in this common bond, right, around how do we integrate our work and our life. >> Kathy, brilliantly said. Thank you so much for stopping by the CUBE and sharing your experiences and your wisdom. I, for one, was very inspired. So thank you for your time. >> Thank you, I was inspired as well. I really appreciate it. >> Oh, thank you. Thank you for watching the CUBE. We are on the ground at VMware for the Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching. (music)

(upbeat music) >> Morning guys and girls, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science WIDS 2023 live at Stanford University. Lisa Martin here with my co-host for this segment, Tracy Zhang. We're really excited to be talking with a great female rockstar. You're going to learn a lot from her next, Jacqueline Kuo, solutions engineer at Dataiku. Welcome, Jacqueline. Great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank for being here. >> I'm so excited to be here. >> So one of the things I have to start out with, 'cause my mom Kathy Dahlia is watching, she's a New Yorker. You are a born and raised New Yorker and I learned from my mom and others. If you're born in New York no matter how long you've moved away, you are a New Yorker. There's you guys have like a secret club. (group laughs) >> I am definitely very proud of being born and raised in New York. My family immigrated to New York, New Jersey from Taiwan. So very proud Taiwanese American as well. But I absolutely love New York and I can't imagine living anywhere else. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I love it. >> So you studied, I was doing some research on you you studied mechanical engineering at MIT. >> Yes. >> That's huge. And you discovered your passion for all things data-related. You worked at IBM as an analytics consultant. Talk to us a little bit about your career path. Were you always interested in engineering STEM-related subjects from the time you were a child? >> I feel like my interests were ranging in many different things and I ended up landing in engineering, 'cause I felt like I wanted to gain a toolkit like a toolset to make some sort of change with or use my career to make some sort of change in this world. And I landed on engineering and mechanical engineering specifically, because I felt like I got to, in my undergrad do a lot of hands-on projects, learn every part of the engineering and design process to build products which is super-transferable and transferable skills sort of is like the trend in my career so far. Where after undergrad I wanted to move back to New York and mechanical engineering jobs are kind of few and fall far in between in the city. And I ended up landing at IBM doing analytics consulting, because I wanted to understand how to use data. I knew that data was really powerful and I knew that working with it could allow me to tell better stories to influence people across different industries. And that's also how I kind of landed at Dataiku to my current role, because it really does allow me to work across different industries and work on different problems that are just interesting. >> Yeah, I like the way that, how you mentioned building a toolkit when doing your studies at school. Do you think a lot of skills are still very relevant to your job at Dataiku right now? >> I think that at the core of it is just problem solving and asking questions and continuing to be curious or trying to challenge what is is currently given to you. And I think in an engineering degree you get a lot of that. >> Yeah, I'm sure. >> But I think that we've actually seen that a lot in the panels today already, that you get that through all different types of work and research and that kind of thoughtfulness comes across in all different industries too. >> Talk a little bit about some of the challenges, that data science is solving, because every company these days, whether it's an enterprise in manufacturing or a small business in retail, everybody has to be data-driven, because the end user, the end customer, whoever that is whether it's a person, an individual, a company, a B2B, expects to have a personalized custom experience and that comes from data. But you have to be able to understand that data treated properly, responsibly. Talk about some of the interesting projects that you're doing at Dataiku or maybe some that you've done in the past that are really kind of transformative across things climate change or police violence, some of the things that data science really is impacting these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that what I love about coming to these conferences is that you hear about those really impactful social impact projects that I think everybody who's in data science wants to be working on. And I think at Dataiku what's great is that we do have this program called Ikig.AI where we work with nonprofits and we support them in their data and analytics projects. And so, a project I worked on was with the Clean Water, oh my goodness, the Ocean Cleanup project, Ocean Cleanup organization, which was amazing, because it was sort of outside of my day-to-day and it allowed me to work with them and help them understand better where plastic is being aggregated across the world and where it appears, whether that's on beaches or in lakes and rivers. So using data to help them better understand that. I feel like from a day-to-day though, we, in terms of our customers, they're really looking at very basic problems with data. And I say basic, not to diminish it, but really just to kind of say that it's high impact, but basic problems around how do they forecast sales better? That's a really kind of, sort of basic problem, but it's actually super-complex and really impactful for people, for companies when it comes to forecasting how much headcount they need to have in the next year or how much inventory to have if they're retail. And all of those are going to, especially for smaller companies, make a huge impact on whether they make profit or not. And so, what's great about working at Dataiku is you get to work on these high-impact projects and oftentimes I think from my perspective, I work as a solutions engineer on the commercial team. So it's just, we work generally with smaller customers and sometimes talking to them, me talking to them is like their first introduction to what data science is and what they can do with that data. And sort of using our platform to show them what the possibilities are and help them build a strategy around how they can implement data in their day-to-day. >> What's the difference? You were a data scientist by title and function, now you're a solutions engineer. Talk about the ascendancy into that and also some of the things that you and Tracy will talk about as those transferable, those transportable skills that probably maybe you learned in engineering, you brought data science now you're bringing to solutions engineering. >> Yeah, absolutely. So data science, I love working with data. I love getting in the weeds of things and I love, oftentimes that means debugging things or looking line by line at your code and trying to make it better. I found that on in the data science role, while those things I really loved, sometimes it also meant that I didn't, couldn't see or didn't have visibility into the broader picture of well like, well why are we doing this project? And who is it impacting? And because oftentimes your day-to-day is very much in the weeds. And so, I moved into sales or solutions engineering at Dataiku to get that perspective, because what a sales engineer does is support the sale from a technical perspective. And so, you really truly understand well, what is the customer looking for and what is going to influence them to make a purchase? And how do you tell the story of the impact of data? Because oftentimes they need to quantify well, if I purchase a software like Dataiku then I'm able to build this project and make this X impact on the business. And that is really powerful. That's where the storytelling comes in and that I feel like a lot of what we've been hearing today about connecting data with people who can actually do something with that data. That's really the bridge that we as sales engineers are trying to connect in that sales process. >> It's all about connectivity, isn't it? >> Yeah, definitely. We were talking about this earlier that it's about making impact and it's about people who we are analyzing data is like influencing. And I saw that one of the keywords or one of the biggest thing at Dataiku is everyday AI, so I wanted to just ask, could you please talk more about how does that weave into the problem solving and then day-to-day making an impact process? >> Yes, so I started working on Dataiku around three years ago and I fell in love with the product itself. The product that we have is we allow for people with different backgrounds. If you're coming from a data analyst background, data science, data engineering, maybe you are more of like a business subject matter expert, to all work in one unified central platform, one user interface. And why that's powerful is that when you're working with data, it's not just that data scientist working on their own and their own computer coding. We've heard today that it's all about connecting the data scientists with those business people, with maybe the data engineers and IT people who are actually going to put that model into production or other folks. And so, they all use different languages. Data scientists might use Python and R, your business people are using PowerPoint and Excel, everyone's using different tools. How do we bring them all in one place so that you can have conversations faster? So the business people can understand exactly what you're building with the data and can get their hands on that data and that model prediction faster. So that's what Dataiku does. That's the product that we have. And I completely forgot your question, 'cause I got so invested in talking about this. Oh, everyday AI. Yeah, so the goal of of Dataiku is really to allow for those maybe less technical people with less traditional data science backgrounds. Maybe they're data experts and they understand the data really well and they've been working in SQL for all their career. Maybe they're just subject matter experts and want to get more into working with data. We allow those people to do that through our no and low-code tools within our platform. Platform is very visual as well. And so, I've seen a lot of people learn data science, learn machine learning by working in the tool itself. And that's sort of, that's where everyday AI comes in, 'cause we truly believe that there are a lot of, there's a lot of unutilized expertise out there that we can bring in. And if we did give them access to data, imagine what we could do in the kind of work that they can do and become empowered basically with that. >> Yeah, we're just scratching the surface. I find data science so fascinating, especially when you talk about some of the real world applications, police violence, health inequities, climate change. Here we are in California and I don't know if you know, we're experiencing an atmospheric river again tomorrow. Californians and the rain- >> Storm is coming. >> We are not good... And I'm a native Californian, but we all know about climate change. People probably don't associate all of the data that is helping us understand it, make decisions based on what's coming what's happened in the past. I just find that so fascinating. But I really think we're truly at the beginning of really understanding the impact that being data-driven can actually mean whether you are investigating climate change or police violence or health inequities or your a grocery store that needs to become data-driven, because your consumer is expecting a personalized relevant experience. I want you to offer me up things that I know I was doing online grocery shopping, yesterday, I just got back from Europe and I was so thankful that my grocer is data-driven, because they made the process so easy for me. And but we have that expectation as consumers that it's going to be that easy, it's going to be that personalized. And what a lot of folks don't understand is the data the democratization of data, the AI that's helping make that a possibility that makes our lives easier. >> Yeah, I love that point around data is everywhere and the more we have, the actually the more access we actually are providing. 'cause now compute is cheaper, data is literally everywhere, you can get access to it very easily. And so, I feel like more people are just getting themselves involved and that's, I mean this whole conference around just bringing more women into this industry and more people with different backgrounds from minority groups so that we get their thoughts, their opinions into the work is so important and it's becoming a lot easier with all of the technology and tools just being open source being easier to access, being cheaper. And that I feel really hopeful about in this field. >> That's good. Hope is good, isn't it? >> Yes, that's all we need. But yeah, I'm glad to see that we're working towards that direction. I'm excited to see what lies in the future. >> We've been talking about numbers of women, percentages of women in technical roles for years and we've seen it hover around 25%. I was looking at some, I need to AnitaB.org stats from 2022 was just looking at this yesterday and the numbers are going up. I think the number was 26, 27.6% of women in technical roles. So we're seeing a growth there especially over pre-pandemic levels. Definitely the biggest challenge that still seems to be one of the biggest that remains is attrition. I would love to get your advice on what would you tell your younger self or the previous prior generation in terms of having the confidence and the courage to pursue engineering, pursue data science, pursue a technical role, and also stay in that role so you can be one of those females on stage that we saw today? >> Yeah, that's the goal right there one day. I think it's really about finding other people to lift and mentor and support you. And I talked to a bunch of people today who just found this conference through Googling it, and the fact that organizations like this exist really do help, because those are the people who are going to understand the struggles you're going through as a woman in this industry, which can get tough, but it gets easier when you have a community to share that with and to support you. And I do want to definitely give a plug to the WIDS@Dataiku team. >> Talk to us about that. >> Yeah, I was so fortunate to be a WIDS ambassador last year and again this year with Dataiku and I was here last year as well with Dataiku, but we have grown the WIDS effort so much over the last few years. So the first year we had two events in New York and also in London. Our Dataiku's global. So this year we additionally have one in the west coast out here in SF and another one in Singapore which is incredible to involve that team. But what I love is that everyone is really passionate about just getting more women involved in this industry. But then also what I find fortunate too at Dataiku is that we have a strong female, just a lot of women. >> Good. >> Yeah. >> A lot of women working as data scientists, solutions engineer and sales and all across the company who even if they aren't doing data work in a day-to-day, they are super-involved and excited to get more women in the technical field. And so. that's like our Empower group internally that hosts events and I feel like it's a really nice safe space for all of us to speak about challenges that we encounter and feel like we're not alone in that we have a support system to make it better. So I think from a nutrition standpoint every organization should have a female ERG to just support one another. >> Absolutely. There's so much value in a network in the community. I was talking to somebody who I'm blanking on this may have been in Barcelona last week, talking about a stat that showed that a really high percentage, 78% of people couldn't identify a female role model in technology. Of course, Sheryl Sandberg's been one of our role models and I thought a lot of people know Sheryl who's leaving or has left. And then a whole, YouTube influencers that have no idea that the CEO of YouTube for years has been a woman, who has- >> And she came last year to speak at WIDS. >> Did she? >> Yeah. >> Oh, I missed that. It must have been, we were probably filming. But we need more, we need to be, and it sounds like Dataiku was doing a great job of this. Tracy, we've talked about this earlier today. We need to see what we can be. And it sounds like Dataiku was pioneering that with that ERG program that you talked about. And I completely agree with you. That should be a standard program everywhere and women should feel empowered to raise their hand ask a question, or really embrace, "I'm interested in engineering, I'm interested in data science." Then maybe there's not a lot of women in classes. That's okay. Be the pioneer, be that next Sheryl Sandberg or the CTO of ChatGPT, Mira Murati, who's a female. We need more people that we can see and lean into that and embrace it. I think you're going to be one of them. >> I think so too. Just so that young girls like me like other who's so in school, can see, can look up to you and be like, "She's my role model and I want to be like her. And I know that there's someone to listen to me and to support me if I have any questions in this field." So yeah. >> Yeah, I mean that's how I feel about literally everyone that I'm surrounded by here. I find that you find role models and people to look up to in every conversation whenever I'm speaking with another woman in tech, because there's a journey that has had happen for you to get to that place. So it's incredible, this community. >> It is incredible. WIDS is a movement we're so proud of at theCUBE to have been a part of it since the very beginning, since 2015, I've been covering it since 2017. It's always one of my favorite events. It's so inspiring and it just goes to show the power that data can have, the influence, but also just that we're at the beginning of uncovering so much. Jacqueline's been such a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> For sharing your story, sharing with us what Dataiku was doing and keep going. More power to you girl. We're going to see you up on that stage one of these years. >> Thank you so much. Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. >> Our pleasure. >> For our guests and Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live at WIDS '23. #EmbraceEquity is this year's International Women's Day theme. Stick around, our next guest joins us in just a minute. (upbeat music)

>>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of IFS Unleashed in Miami. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here half a day so far, having great conversations. It is so great to be back on the show floor and I'm getting that sentiment from the IFS execs, their customers, their partners, and the ecosystem. I'm pleased to welcome Kathy Hall as my next guest, the SVP of experience at ifs. Kathy, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. >>Love talking about the customer experience. Talk to me, but the employee experience is equally important because they're like this, but talk to me about your role as the SVP of experience and what that entails. >>Yeah, so I'm really, really fortunate at IFS to be SVP across experience. So I do a lot of work with the r and d team, but I also have a role that spans sales consulting support so I can really get involved in any part of the organization to enable us to deliver moments of service. So I'm really, really fortunate. I've got such a broad remit and really work on everything from the user experience and what the product looks like, feels like, how it interacts, how it moves, how we put our partner, the technologies in there, everything to their customer experience. So how people find it if they have to engage with support or what it's like in presales. And we are really trying to wrap that up into a total experience so that we bring all of those parts together and really productize our experience so that every customer gets a fantastic experience and the best moments of service. So yeah, it's like a short job title and it's a really kind of big role. It's fantastic. >>It is. It's very, it's very encompassing. You have so much visibility across the entire organization that impacts the customer in many different ways. I can't only imagine that having that visibility in that role really helps to create not only a great customer experience but a, a great experience for the employees. And those two things I always think of them as like this, like inextricably linked. >>Yeah, exactly. And we've done a lot over the last couple of years of really trying to make sure we've got the data so we understand both from a product point of view and a service point of view, what our users and our customers think about that moment of service. Where the friction points are, you know, what's really good and, and we can use that to coach our employees to celebrate success, to give people kudos for the fantastic work they do. And that really enables us to create a hype around the customer within, within ifs. And just last week we were celebrating CX day and we did a whole week and had our own sort of internal hashtag of CX days every day. And that was fantastic to really galvanize that spirit of those ifss, you know, Team Purple, really being at the forefront of how we deliver that, that customer experience. And it's fantastic for our customers, but it's also brilliant for our people because it's motivating and, and it empowers people to, to be able to do a great job, which is what we all want to do. >>Absolutely. Employees need to be empowered because if that's not there, then the customer experience inextricably linked will suffer. Talk to me a little bit about the evolution of the role. Has it been something that's been the, a focus of ifs? Cuz there's, you guys have so many unique differentiators for, for a company that isn't widely known, but talk to me about how that came about going, you know, what we need to be able to take to really look at the customer experience through many different lenses, take their feedback and really deliver a product experience that is seamless so that they can deliver those moments of service. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, when, when Darren took over a ceo, we've been on this really kind of passionate journey to bring service to our customers, bring value to our customers, you know, we really value is at the heart of, of everything for our customers. And, and so it's our ethos too. And so we've, we've sort of woven this value into everything that we do with that focus on the customer. So my role started off sort of more in the come in and then try and understand it from a very product point of view, but in today's kind of world products and service lines emerging things need to be unified. You know, if you go back 20 years a product was built and it got shipped out and somebody picks it up and they implemented it and then there was a support and there were sort of these walls in between, but now of course it is a cloud company and those walls don't exist anymore. >>Product features are coming out regularly. The code sort of flows through the system out to customers. The way that we service has to be different. And so we're thinking all the time, how do we get that to be a seamless process and how do we enable, for example, data within a customer system to identify opportunities to create more value for that customer using technology like AI for example, and then being able to highlight that value back. But then maybe you say to the presales person, okay, this is the precise demonstration and capability that the customer needs to see because this is what the, the system's telling us is the business case. And that then flows through to the scope and it enables us to, to deliver that value. So it's really changing the way that we think about these things and unifying together that product and that service into this kind of bigger total experience and this end to end experience. >>So we're really looking at what are all the friction points along our journeys with the customers, How does it stop them getting value? How do we prioritize that value and, and therefore how do we reimagine an end to end experience? So as that thinking's evolved, my role's also evolved from being quite product centric to being very much across the organization. And I'm lucky I come from a commercial and operational background, so I've got a vast amount of experience in delivering these types of solutions. So that's really helped as well because I'm able to see that that full end to end and, and I've got a, you know, brilliant team of people and, and it comes back to the point where we said before, the people ifs are so engaged to want to deliver value, to want to deliver the moments of service that, that it's kind of easy, you know, just got to kind of focus people in the right way and, and the s comes together. >>That's nice to hear. And that's actually the vibe and the sentiment that we're getting from this. You know, talking about the end to end experience. It's so critical because people used to tolerate fragmented experiences. We don't anymore. One of the things that went away, I think or is in massively short supply during Covid and may not come back as patience and tolerance, right? So being able to deliver that end to end experience to your customers through what you're doing internally is critical for differentiation, for competitive advantage, and of course for your customers to be successful with their customers. >>Yeah, and there's so many parts of that that you could un pick. We, we could spend hours talking about it and as consumers our expectations are huge and we carry those expectations into the workplace. And in the same way, you know, at IFS we want our team to be motivated and, you know, proud and excited about the moments of service they're delivering. Our customers want the same thing from their teams and that also means they want a system where it's easy to train, easy to use, you can pick up, it looks great, you know, it gives users love ifs and it kind of gives them a tool that helps 'em get the job done, doesn't stand in their way. So, you know, all the kind of things we think about internally and how we're measuring customer experience also translates and resonates with our customers. Everything we think about how, you know, our people need to be empowered to deliver a customer experience. That's the same messages that, you know, we hear back time and time again from our customers. So there's so many parallels and we're really able to work with our customers to kind of do both at the same time, which is fantastic. >>Talk about measurement. What are some of the key indicators of success cus success in in from an experienced lens internally and with your customers? >>Yeah, so I mean there's all the obvious ones about, you know, MPS and CSAT and customer effort score. We also put a lot of value into the qualitative feedback. So we use customer A avail, which is an IFS product to collect data on our own moments of service. And you know, the numbers are great and they tell a story, but I also get really sucked into reading the comments back from the customers and there's kind of text analytics and sentiment analytics and for me that's becoming the more powerful kind of piece of data to look at because a story conveys much more than a simple number and it's also something that goes global as well. You know, different countries score in different ways. There's different kind of, you know, there's a lot of gaming that can go on with a score. It can be quite difficult to really interpret, but a but a story and understanding the sentiment behind that customer, that's gold. And if you can put those together and have a way of on scale being able to interpret that analysis, which we can do, you know, that becomes something quite special. So for me it's about a shift to understanding more of those stories as well as keeping, you know, the kind of traditional, traditional measures across the, the learning across the journey points, >>Right? The, the value, I always think the value of the voice of the customer is probably invaluable to organizations because it's honest. >>It absolutely it's honest. And I think once you've got those stories and you've got those metrics and then you're looking at your operational metrics, so what does that mean then in terms of, you know, recur revenue and what does that mean in terms of margins and the costs? And being able to put those three things together so that you couldn't understand the levers that you've got and the, and the results of those levers, that becomes really powerful. And that's really what's driving our, our customers for, for them to deliver in their moments of service as well, which ties back into when we're working within customers and engaging with customers and looking at that value story, doing the value assessments more able to use the, the evidence from industry and previous customers and, and the data sources available to help them also project, you know, an operational efficiency here will have this c CX benefit but actually also has this value benefit >>Oh, a value back to the business. I mean a a good experience is transformative. Yeah, >>Really powerful. >>Any industry. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's so powerful and you know, that really resonates with our customers and that's what they're trying to, to achieve all the time. And so when they're looking at IFS cloud in particular, they're looking at how, you know, the, the software can help them achieve those moments of service and perfect those moments of service and all the technology that comes into play that can enable people to improve those moments of service at the same time as getting those operational benefits. And that enables organizations to then invest more in the customer experience, more advocacy and, and really, you know, feels growth. There's, there's no denying that now you have to have that experience and, and at your point before the expectation from as others consumers, we won't tolerate a bad experience anymore, which is a good thing. >>It is. We, we've all had met plenty of those throughout the last two and a half years. Last question for you, you, what are some of the things that are next for experience at ifs? I know you mentioned before we went live that you started during the pandemic, so you go, go get to meet your team finally, but what are some of the things that excite you about the momentum that you guys are carrying through the rest of the second half? >>Yeah, so our focus now is really bringing the component parts together. So we have several tools across our whole experience that leverage from our IFFs cloud platform in order to deliver those moments of service to our customers. But those tools have grown up in different areas of the business because there's been a specific need in that area of the business. So tools at the pre-sale stage, tools that enable us to deliver scope, more frictionlessly tools that enable us to, to identify and capture value. The next stage is bringing those all together. So this week I announced our vision for experience and the experience hub and that really being a place where you get that thread of value throughout the whole experience where everything is tied into one place and it makes it really frictionless for our customers to get the value from ifs. >>And that's critical. You guys have north of 10,000 customers, it's only growing. Kathy, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about the end to end experience that IFS delivers internally and externally to its customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you for having >>Me. My pleasure. For Kathy Hall, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube live on the show floor of IFS Unleashed from Miami. Stick around. My next guest joins me in just a minute. I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had the.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante by the dip has been been an effective strategy since the market bottomed in early march last year the approach has been especially successful in tech and even more so for those tech names that one were well positioned for the forced march to digital i sometimes call it i.e remote work online commerce data centric platforms and certain cyber security plays and two already had the cloud figured out the question on investors minds is where to go from here should you avoid some of the high flyers that are richly valued with eye-popping multiples or should you continue to buy the dip and if so which companies that capitalized on the trends from last year will see permanent shifts in spending patterns that make them a solid long-term play hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we shine the spotlight on three companies that may be candidates for a buy the dip strategy and it's our pleasure to welcome in ivana delevco who's the chief investment officer and founder of spear alpha a new research-centric etf focused on industrial technology ivana is a long-time equity analyst with a background in both long and short investing ivana welcome to the program thanks so much for coming on thanks for having me david yeah it's really our pleasure i i want to start with your etf and give the folks a bit more background about you first you know we gotta let people know i'm not an investment pro i'm not an advisor i don't make stock recommendations i don't sell investments so you got to do your own research i have a lot of data so happy to share it but you got to understand your own risks you of course yvonne on the other hand you do offer investment services and so people before investing got to carefully review all the available available investment docs understand what you're getting into before you invest now with that out of the way ivana i have some stats up here on this slide your spear you're a newly launched female lead firm that does deep research into the supply chain we're going to talk about that you try to uncover as i understand it under-appreciated industrial tech firms and some really pretty cool areas that we list here but tell us a little bit more about your background and your etf so thanks for having me david my background is in industrial research and industrial technology investments i've spent the past 15 years covering this space and what we've seen over the past five years is technology changes that are really driving fundamental shifts in industrial manufacturing processes so whether this is 5g connectivity innovation in the software stack increasing compute speeds all of these are major technological advancements that are impacting uh traditional manufacturers so what we try to do is assess speak to these firms and assess who is at the leading and who is at the lagging end of this digital transformation and we're trying to assess what vendors they're using what processes they're implementing and that is how we generate most of our investment ideas okay great and and we show on the bottom of of this sort of intro slide if you will uh so one of the processes that you use and one of the things that that is notable a lot of people compare you uh to kathy woods are investments when you came out uh i think you use a different process i mean maybe there are some similarities in terms of disruption but at the bottom of this slide it shows a mckinsey sort of graphic that that i think informs people as to how you really dig into the supply chain from a research standpoint is that right absolutely so for us it's all about understanding the supply chain going deep in the supply chain and gather data points from primary sources that we can then translate into investment opportunities so if you look at this mckinsey graph uh you will see that there is a lot of opportunity to for these companies to transform themselves both on the front end which means better revenue better products and on their operation side which means lower cost whether it's through better operations or through better processes on the the back end so what we do is we will speak to a traditional manufacturing company and ask them okay well what do you use for better product development and they will give us the name of the firms and give us an assessment of what's the differences between the competitors why they like one versus the other so then we're gonna take the data and we will put it into our financial model and we'll understand the broader market for it um the addressable market the market share that the company has and will project the growth so for these higher growth stocks that that you cover the main alpha generation uh potential here is to understand what the amount of growth these companies will generate over the next 10 to 20 years so it's really all about projecting growth in the next three years in the next five years and where will growth ultimately settle in in the next 10 to 20 years love it we're gonna have a fun conversation because today we're going to get into your thesis for cooper snowflake and z scalar we're going to bring in some of our own data some of our data from etr and and why you think these companies may be candidates for long-term growth and and be buy the dip stock so to do that i hacked up this little comparison slide we're showing here i do this for context our audience knows i'm not a cfa or a valuation expert but we like to do simple comparisons just to give people context and a sense of relative size growth and valuation and so this chart attempts to do that so what i did is i took the most recent quarterly revenue for cooper snowflake and z scalar multiplied it by four to get a run rate we included servicenow in the table just for baseline reference because bill mcdermott as we've reported aspires to make service now the next great enterprise software company alongside with salesforce and oracle and some of the others and and all these companies that we list here that through the three here they aspire to do so in their own domain so we're displaying the market cap from friday morning september 10th we calculated a revenue run rate multiple and we show the quarterly revenue growth and what this data does is gives you a sense of the three companies they're well on their way to a billion dollars in revenue it underscores the relationship between revenue growth and valuation snowflake being the poster child for that dynamic savannah i know you do much more detailed financial analysis but let's talk about these companies in order maybe start with koopa they just crushed their quarter i mean they blew away consensus on the top line what else about the company do you like and why is it on your by the dip list so just to back up david on valuation these companies investors either directly or indirectly value on a dcf basis and what happened at the beginning of the year as interest rates started increasing people started freaking out and once you plug in 100 basis points higher interest rate in your dcf model you get significant price downside so that really drove a lot of the pullback at the beginning of the year right now where we stand today interest rates haven't really moved all that significantly off the bot of the bottom they're still around the same levels maybe a little bit higher but those are not the types of moves that are going to drive significant downside in this stock so as things have stabilized here a lot of these opportunities look pretty attractive on that basis so koopa specifically came out of our um if you go back to that uh the chart of like where the opportunities lie in um in across the manufacturing uh um enterprise koopa is really focused on business pen management so they're really trying to help companies reduce their cost uh and they're a leader in the space uh they're unique uh unique in that they're cloud-based so the feedback we've been hearing from from our companies that use it jetblue uses it train technologies uses it the feedback we've been hearing is that they love the ease of implementation so it's very easy to implement and it drives real savings um savings for these companies so we see in our dcf model we see multiple years of this 30 40 percent growth and that's really driving our price target yeah and we can i can confirm that i mean i mean just anecdotally you know you know we serve a lot of the technology community and many of our clients are saying hey okay you know when you go to do invoicing or whatever you work with procurement it's koopa you know this is some ariba that's kind of the legacy which is sap we'll talk about that a little later but let's talk about snowflake um you know snowflake we've been tracking them very closely we know the management there we've watched them through their last two companies now here and have been following that company early on since since really 2015. tell us why you like snowflake um and and maybe why you think it can continue its rapid growth thanks david so first of all i need to compliment you on your research on the company on the technology side so where we come in is more from understanding where our companies can use soft snowflake and where snowflake can add value so what we've been hearing from our companies is the challenge that they're facing is that everybody's moving to the cloud but it's not as simple as just send your data to the cloud and call aws and they're gonna generate more revenue for your solve your cost problem so what we've been hearing is that companies need to find tools that are easy to use where they can use their own domain expertise and just plug and play so um ansys is one of the companies we covered the dust simulation they've found snowflake to be an extremely useful tool in sales lead generation and within sales crm systems have been around for a while and they're they've really been implemented but analyzing sales numbers is something that is new to this company some some of our companies don't even know what their sales are even when they look back after the quarter is closed so tools like this help um companies do easy analytics and therefore drive revenue and cost savings growth so we see really big runway for for this company and i think the most misunderstood part about it is that people view it as a warehousing data warehousing play while this is all about compute and the company does a good job separating the two and what our their customers like or like the companies that we cover like about it is that it can lower their compute costs um and make it much easier much more easily manageable for them great and we're going to talk about more about each of these companies but let's talk about z-scaler a bit i mean z-scaler is a company we've been very excited about and identified them kind of early on they've definitely benefited from the move to cloud generally and specifically the remote work uh situation with the cyber threats etc but tell us why you like z-scaler so interestingly z-scaler um we like the broader security space um the broader cyber security space and interestingly our companies are not yet spending to the level that is commensurate with the increase in attack rate so we think this is a trend that is really going to accelerate as we go forward um my own board 20 of the time on the last board meeting was spent on cyber security what we're doing and this is a pretty simple operation that that we're running here so you can imagine for a large enterprise with thousands of people all around the world um needing to be on a single simple system z-scaler really fits well here very easy to implement several of our industrial companies use it siemens uses it ge uses it and they've had great great experience with it excellent i just want to take a quick look at how some of these names have performed over the last year and and what if anything this data tells us this is a chart comparing the past 12 months performance of of those four companies uh that we just talked about and we added in you know servicenow z scalar as you can see has outperformed the other despite your commentary on discounted cash flow snowflake is underperformed really precisely for the reasons that you mentioned not to mention the fact that it was pretty highly valued and you can see relative to the nas but it's creeping back lately after very strong earnings even though the stock dropped after it beat earnings because the street wants the cfo to say to guide even higher than maybe as mike scarpelli feels is prudent and you can see cooper has also underperformed relatively speaking i mean it absolutely destroyed consensus this week the stock went up but it's been off with the the weaker market this week i know you like to take a longer term view but but anything you would add here yeah so interestingly both z-scaler and koopa were in the camp of as we went into earnings expectations were already pretty high because few of their competitors reported very strong results so this scalar yesterday their revenue growth was was pretty strong the stock is down today uh and the reason is because people were kind of caught up a little bit in the noise of this quarter growth is 57 last quarter it was 60 like is this a deceleration we don't see it as that at all and the company brought up one point that i thought was extremely interesting which is as their deal sizes are getting larger it takes a little longer time for them to see the revenue come through so it takes a little bit of time to for you to see it into from billings into into revenue same thing with cooper very strong earnings report but i think expectations were already pretty high going into it uh given the service now and um and anna plan as well reported strong results so i think it's all about positioning so we love these setups where you can buy the deep in on this opportunity where like people get caught up in um short-term noise and and it creates good entry points excellent i i want to bring in some data from our partner etr and see if you have any comments ivana so what we're showing here is a two-dimensional chart we like to show this uh very frequently it's based on a survey of between a thousand and fifteen hundred chief information officers and technology buyers every quarter this is from their most recent july survey the vertical axis shows net score which is a measure of spending momentum i mean this it measures the net percentage of customers in the survey that are spending more on a particular product or platform in other words it essentially subtracts the percentage of customers spending less from those spending more which yields a net score it's more granular than that but basically that's what it does the horizontal axis is market share or pervasiveness in the data set it's not revenue market share like you get from idc it's it's a mention market share and now that red dotted line at the 40 percent mark on the vertical represents an elevated level in other words anything above 40 percent we consider notable and we've plotted our three by the dip companies and included some of their competitors for context and you can see we added salesforce servicenow and oracle and that orange ellipse because they're some of the bigger names in the software business so let's take these in alphabetical order ivana starting with koopa in the blue you can see we plotted them next to sap's ariba and you can see cooper has stronger spending momentum but not as much presence in the market so to me my influence is oh that's an opportunity for them to steal share more modern technology you know more facile and of course oracle has products in this space but the oracle dot includes all oracle products not just the procurement stuff but uh maybe your thoughts on this absolutely i love this chart i think that's your spot on this would be the same way i would interpret the chart where um increased spending momentum is is a sign of the company providing products that people like and we we expect to see cooper's share grow market share grow over time as well so let's come back to the chart and i want to i want to really point out the green ellipse this is the data zone if you will uh and we're like a broken record on this program with snowflake has performed unbelievably well in net score and spending momentum every quarter the dtr has captured enough end sample in its survey holding near or above 80 percent its net score consistently is has been up there and we've plotted data bricks in that zone it's been expected right that data bricks is going to do an ipo this year late last month company raised 1.6 billion in a private round so i guess that was either a strategy to delay the ipo or raise a bunch more cash and give late investors a low risk bite at the apple you know pre-ipo as we saw with snowflake last year what we didn't plot here are some of snowflake's biggest competitors ivana who also happen to be their partners most notably the big cloud players all who have their own database offerings aws microsoft and google now you've said snowflake is much more than a database company i wonder if you could add some color here yeah that's a very good point david uh basically the the driver of the thesis in snowflake is all about acceleration and spending and what we are seeing is the customers that are signed up on their platform today they're not even spending they're probably spending less than five percent of what they can ultimately spend on this product and the reason is because they don't yet know what the ultimate applications are for this right so you're gonna start with putting the data in a format you can use and you need to come up with use cases or how are you actually going to use this data so back to the example that i gave with answers the first use case that they found was trying to optimize leads there could be like 100 other use cases and they're coming up with with those on a daily basis so i would expect um this score to keep keep uh keep up pretty high or or go even higher as we as people figure out how they can use this product you know the buy-the-dip thesis on snowflake was great last quarter because the stock pulled back after they announced earnings and when we reported we said you know mike the the company see well cleveland research came out remember they got the dip on that and we looked at the data and we said mike scarpelli said that you know we're going to probably as a percentage of overall customers decelerate the net net new logos but we're going deeper into the customer base and that's exactly what's happening with with snowflake but okay let's bring up the slide again last but not least the z scaler we love z scalar we named z scaler in 2019 as an emerging four-star security company along with crowdstrike and octa and we said these three should be on your radar and as you see we've plotted z scalar with octa who with its it's its recent move into to converging identity and governance uh it gets kind of interesting uh we plotted them with palo alto as well another cyber security player that we've covered extensively we love octa in addition to z-scaler we great respect for palo alto and you'll note all of them are over that 40 percent line these are disruptors they're benefiting well not so much palo alto they're more legacy but the the other two are benefiting from that shift to work from home cloud security modern tech stack uh the acquisition that octa-made of of of auth0 and again z scalar cloud security getting rid of a lot of hardware uh really has a huge tailwind at its back if on a zscaler you know they've benefited from the huge my cloud migration trend what are your thoughts on the company so i actually love all three companies that are there right and the point is people are just going to spend more money whether you are on the cloud of the cloud the data centers need more security as well so i think there is a strong case to be made for all three with this scaler the upside is that it's just very easy to use very easy to implement and if you're somebody that is just setting up infrastructure on the cloud there is no reason for you to call any other competitor right with palo alto the case there is that if you have an established um security platfor if you're on their security platform the databa on the data center side uh they they did introduce through several acquisitions a pretty attractive cloud offering as well so they've been gaining share as well in the space and and the company does look pretty attractive on valiation basis so for us cyber security is really all about rising tide lifts all boats here right so you can have a pure play like this scaler uh that benefits from the cloud but even somebody like palo alto is pretty well positioned um to benefit yeah we think so too over a year ago we reported on the valuation divergence between palo alto and fortinet fortinet was doing a better job moving to the cloud and obviously serves more of a mid-market space palo alto had some go-to-market execution challenges we said at the time they're going to get through those and when we talk to chief information security officers palo alto is like the gold standard they're the thought leader they want to work with them but at the same time they also want to participate in some of these you know modern cloud stacks so i we agree there's plenty of room for all three um just to add a bit more color and drill into the spending data a little bit more this slide here takes that net score and shows the progression since january 2019 and you can see a snowflake just incredible in terms of its ability to maintain that elevated net score as we talked about and the table on the insert it shows you the number of responses and all three of these companies have been getting more mentions over time but snowflake and z scale are now both well over 100 n in the survey each quarter and the other notable piece here and this is really important you can see all three are coming out of the isolation economy with the spending uptick nice upticks shown in the most recent survey so that's again another positive but i want to close ivana with kind of making the bull and bear case and have you address really the risks to the buy the dip scenario so look there are a lot of reasons to like these companies we talked about them cooper they've got earnings momentum you know management on the call side had very strong end market demand this the stock you know has underperformed the nasdaq you know this year snowflake and zscaler they also have momentum snowflake get this enormous tam uh although they were punished for not putting a hard number on it which is ridiculous in my opinion i mean the thing is it's huge um the investors were just kind of you know wanting a little binky baby blanket but they all have modern tech in the cloud and really importantly this shows in the etr surveys you know the momentum that they have so very high retention is the other point i wanted to make the very very low churn of these companies however cooper's management despite the blowout quarter they gave kind of underwhelming guidance they've cited headwinds uh they've with the the the lamisoft uh migration to their cloud platform snowflake is kind of like price to perfection so maybe that's an advantage because every every little negative news is going to going to cause the company to dip but it's you know it's pretty high value because salutman and scarpelli everybody expects them to surpass what happened at servicenow which was a rocket ship and it could be all argued that all three are richly priced and overvalued so but ivana you're looking out as you said a couple of years three years maybe even five years how do you think about the potential downside risks in in your by the dip scenario you buy every dip you looking for bigger dips or what's your framework there so what we try to do is really look every quarter the company reports is there something that's driving fundamental change to the story or is it a one-off situation where people are just misunderstanding what the company is reporting so in the case we kind of addressed some of the earnings that that were reported but with koopa we think the man that management is guiding conservatively as they should so we're not very concerned about their ability to execute on on the guidance and and to exceed the guidance with snowflake price to perfection that's never a good idea to avoid a stock uh because it just shows that there is the company is doing a great job executing right so um we are looking for reports like the cleveland report where they would be like negative on the stock and that would be an entry point uh for us so broadly we apply by the deep philosophy but not not if something fundamentally changes in the story and none of these three are showing any signs of fundamental change okay we're going to leave it right there thanks to my guest today ivana tremendous having you would love to have you back great to see you thank you david and def you definitely want to check out sprx and the spear etf now remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search breaking analysis podcasts you can always connect with me on twitter i'm at d vallante or email me at david.vellante at siliconangle.com love the comments on linkedin don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The next 10 years of cloud, they're going to differ dramatically from the past decade. The early days of cloud, deployed virtualization of standard off-the-shelf components, X86 microprocessors, disk drives et cetera, to then scale out and build a large distributed system. The coming decade is going to see a much more data-centric, real-time, intelligent, call it even hyper-decentralized cloud that will comprise on-prem, hybrid, cross-cloud and edge workloads with a services layer that will obstruct the underlying complexity of the infrastructure which will also comprise much more custom and varied components. This was a key takeaway of the guests from theCUBE on Cloud, an event hosted by SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this episode, we'll summarize the findings of our recent event and extract the signal from our great guests with a couple of series and comments and clips from the show. CUBE on Cloud is our very first virtual editorial event. It was designed to bring together our community in an open forum. We ran the day on our 365 software platform and had a great lineup of CEOs, CIOs, data practitioners technologists. We had cloud experts, analysts and many opinion leaders all brought together in a day long series of sessions that we developed in order to unpack the future of cloud computing in the coming decade. Let me briefly frame up the conversation and then turn it over to some of our guests. First, we put forth our view of how modern cloud has evolved and where it's headed. This graphic that we're showing here, talks about the progression of cloud innovation over time. A cloud like many innovations, it started as a novelty. When AWS announced S3 in March of 2006, nobody in the vendor or user communities really even in the trade press really paid too much attention to it. Then later that year, Amazon announced EC2 and people started to think about a new model of computing. But it was largely tire kickers, bleeding-edge developers that took notice and really leaned in. Now the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, really created what we call a cloud awakening and it put cloud on the radar of many CFOs. Shadow IT emerged within departments that wanted to take IT in bite-sized chunks and along with the CFO wanted to take it as OPEX versus CAPEX. And then I teach transformation that really took hold. We came out of the financial crisis and we've been on an 11-year cloud boom. And it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon, cloud has really disrupted the on-prem model as we've reported and completely transformed IT. Ironically, the pandemic hit at the beginning of this decade, and created a mandate to go digital. And so it accelerated the industry transformation that we're highlighting here, which probably would have taken several more years to mature but overnight the forced March to digital happened. And it looks like it's here to stay. Now the next wave, we think we'll be much more about business or industry transformation. We're seeing the first glimpses of that. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research summed it up at our event very well I thought, he basically said the cloud is the big winner of COVID. Of course we know that now normally we talk about seven-year economic cycles. He said he was talking about for planning and investment cycles. Now we operate in seven-day cycles. The examples he gave where do we open or close the store? How do we pivot to support remote workers without the burden of CAPEX? And we think that the things listed on this chart are going to be front and center in the coming years, data AI, a fully digitized and intelligence stack that will support next gen disruptions in autos, manufacturing, finance, farming and virtually every industry where the system will expand to the edge. And the underlying infrastructure across physical locations will be hidden. Many issues remain, not the least of which is latency which we talked about at the event in quite some detail. So let's talk about how the Big 3 cloud players are going to participate in this next era. Well, in short, the consensus from the event was that the rich get richer. Let's take a look at some data. This chart shows our most recent estimates of IaaS and PaaS spending for the Big 3. And we're going to update this after earning season but there's a couple of points stand out. First, we want to make the point that combined the Big 3 now account for almost $80 billion of infrastructure spend last year. That $80 billion, was not all incremental (laughs) No it's caused consolidation and disruption in the on-prem data center business and within IT shops companies like Dell, HPE, IBM, Oracle many others have felt the heat and have had to respond with hybrid and cross cloud strategies. Second while it's true that Azure and GCP they appear to be growing faster than AWS. We don't know really the exact numbers, of course because only AWS provides a clean view of IaaS and passwords, Microsoft and Google. They kind of hide them all ball on their numbers which by the way, I don't blame them but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues on growth rates. And we have other means of estimating through surveys and the like, but it's undeniable Azure is closing the revenue gap on AWS. The third is that I like the fact that Azure and Google are growing faster than AWS. AWS is the only company by our estimates to grow its business sequentially last quarter. And in and of itself, that's not really enough important. What is significant is that because AWS is so large now at 45 billion, even at their slower growth rates it grows much more in absolute terms than its competitors. So we think AWS is going to keep its lead for some time. We think Microsoft and AWS will continue to lead the pack. You know, they might converge maybe it will be a 200 just race in terms of who's first who's second in terms of cloud revenue and how it's counted depending on what they count in their numbers. And Google look with its balance sheet and global network. It's going to play the long game and virtually everyone else with the exception of perhaps Alibaba is going to be secondary players on these platforms. Now this next graphic underscores that reality and kind of lays out the competitive landscape. What we're showing here is survey data from ETR of more than 1400 CIOs and IT buyers and on the vertical axis is Net Score which measures spending momentum on the horizontal axis is so-called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. The key points are AWS and Microsoft look at it. They stand alone so far ahead of the pack. I mean, they really literally, it would have to fall down to lose their lead high spending velocity and large share of the market or the hallmarks of these two companies. And we don't think that's going to change anytime soon. Now, Google, even though it's far behind they have the financial strength to continue to position themselves as an alternative to AWS. And of course, an analytics specialist. So it will continue to grow, but it will be challenged. We think to catch up to the leaders. Now take a look at the hybrid zone where the field is playing. These are companies that have a large on-prem presence and have been forced to initiate a coherent cloud strategy. And of course, including multicloud. And we include Google in this so pack because they're behind and they have to take a differentiated approach relative to AWS, and maybe cozy up to some of these traditional enterprise vendors to help Google get to the enterprise. And you can see from the on-prem crowd, VMware Cloud on AWS is stands out as having some, some momentum as does Red Hat OpenShift, which is it's cloudy, but it's really sort of an ingredient it's not really broad IaaS specifically but it's a component of cloud VMware cloud which includes VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation. And even Dell's cloud. We would expect HPE with its GreenLake strategy. Its financials is shoring up, should be picking up momentum in the future in terms of what the customers of this survey consider cloud. And then of course you could see IBM and Oracle you're in the game, but they don't have the spending momentum and they don't have the CAPEX chops to compete with the hyperscalers IBM's cloud revenue actually dropped 7% last quarter. So that highlights the challenges that that company facing Oracle's cloud business is growing in the single digits. It's kind of up and down, but again underscores these two companies are really about migrating their software install basis to their captive clouds and as well for IBM, for example it's launched a financial cloud as a way to differentiate and not take AWS head-on an infrastructure as a service. The bottom line is that other than the Big 3 in Alibaba the rest of the pack will be plugging into hybridizing and cross-clouding those platforms. And there are definitely opportunities there specifically related to creating that abstraction layer that we talked about earlier and hiding that underlying complexity and importantly creating incremental value good examples, snowfallLike what snowflake is doing with its data cloud, what the data protection guys are doing. A company like Loomio is headed in that direction as are others. So, you keep an eye on that and think about where the white space is and where the value can be across-clouds. That's where the opportunity is. So let's see, what is this all going to look like? How does the cube community think it's going to unfold? Let's hear from theCUBE Guests and theCUBE on Cloud speakers and some of those highlights. Now, unfortunately we don't have time to show you clips from every speaker. We are like 10-plus hours of video content but we've tried to pull together some comments that summarize the sentiment from the community. So I'm going to have John Furrier briefly explain what theCUBE on Cloud is all about and then let the guests speak for themselves. After John, Pradeep Sindhu is going to give a nice technical overview of how the cloud was built out and what's changing in the future. I'll give you a hint it has to do with data. And then speaking of data, Mai-Lan Bukovec, who heads up AWS is storage portfolio. She'll explain how she views the coming changes in cloud and how they look at storage. Again, no surprise, it's all about data. Now, one of the themes that you'll hear from guests is the notion of a distributed cloud model. And Zhamak Deghani, he was a data architect. She'll explain her view of the future of data architectures. We also have thoughts from analysts like Zeus Karavalla and Maribel Lopez, and some comments from both Microsoft and Google to compliment AWS's view of the world. In fact, we asked JG Chirapurath from Microsoft to comment on the common narrative that Microsoft products are not best-to-breed. They put out a one dot O and then they get better, or sometimes people say, well, they're just good enough. So we'll see what his response is to that. And Paul Gillin asks, Amit Zavery of Google his thoughts on the cloud leaderboard and how Google thinks about their third-place position. Dheeraj Pandey gives his perspective on how technology has progressed and been miniaturized over time. And what's coming in the future. And then Simon Crosby gives us a framework to think about the edge as the most logical opportunity to process data not necessarily a physical place. And this was echoed by John Roese, and Chris Wolf to experience CTOs who went into some great depth on this topic. Unfortunately, I don't have the clips of those two but their comments can be found on the CTO power panel the technical edge it's called that's the segment at theCUBE on Cloud events site which we'll share the URL later. Now, the highlight reel ends with CEO Joni Klippert she talks about the changes in securing the cloud from a developer angle. And finally, we wrap up with a CIO perspective, Dan Sheehan. He provides some practical advice on building on his experience as a CIO, COO and CTO specifically how do you as a business technology leader deal with the rapid pace of change and still be able to drive business results? Okay, so let's now hear from the community please run the highlights. >> Well, I think one of the things we talked about COVID is the personal impact to me but other people as well one of the things that people are craving right now is information, factual information, truth, textures that we call it. But here this event for us Dave is our first inaugural editorial event. Rob, both Kristen Nicole the entire cube team, SiliconANGLE on theCUBE we're really trying to put together more of a cadence. We're going to do more of these events where we can put out and feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires of people making things happen, but it's often the people under them that are the real Newsmakers. >> If you look at the architecture of cloud data centers the single most important invention was scale-out. Scale-out of identical or near identical servers all connected to a standard IP ethernet network. That's the architecture. Now the building blocks of this architecture is ethernet switches which make up the network, IP ethernet switches. And then the server is all built using general purpose x86 CPU's with DRAM, with SSD, with hard drives all connected to inside the CPU. Now, the fact that you scale these server nodes as they're called out was very, very important in addressing the problem of how do you build very large scale infrastructure using general purpose compute but this architecture, Dave is a compute centric architecture. And the reason it's a compute centric architecture is if you open this, is server node. What you see is a connection to the network typically with a simple network interface card. And then you have CPU's which are in the middle of the action. Not only are the CPU's processing the application workload but they're processing all of the IO workload what we call data centric workload. And so when you connect SSDs and hard drives and GPU is everything to the CPU, as well as to the network you can now imagine that the CPU is doing two functions. It's running the applications but it's also playing traffic cop for the IO. So every IO has to go to the CPU and you're executing instructions typically in the operating system. And you're interrupting the CPU many many millions of times a second. Now general purpose CPU and the architecture of the CPU's was never designed to play traffic cop because the traffic cop function is a function that requires you to be interrupted very, very frequently. So it's critical that in this new architecture where does a lot of data, a lot of these stress traffic the percentage of workload, which is data centric has gone from maybe one to 2% to 30 to 40%. >> The path to innovation is paved by data. If you don't have data, you don't have machine learning you don't have the next generation of analytics applications that helps you chart a path forward into a world that seems to be changing every week. And so in order to have that insight in order to have that predictive forecasting that every company needs, regardless of what industry that you're in today, it all starts from data. And I think the key shift that I've seen is how customers are thinking about that data, about being instantly usable. Whereas in the past, it might've been a backup. Now it's part of a data Lake. And if you can bring that data into a data lake you can have not just analytics or machine learning or auditing applications it's really what does your application do for your business and how can it take advantage of that vast amount of shared data set in your business? >> We are actually moving towards decentralization if we think today, like if it let's move data aside if we said is the only way web would work the only way we get access to various applications on the web or pages to centralize it We would laugh at that idea. But for some reason we don't question that when it comes to data, right? So I think it's time to embrace the complexity that comes with the growth of number of sources, the proliferation of sources and consumptions models, embrace the distribution of sources of data that they're not just within one part of organization. They're not just within even bounds of organizations that are beyond the bounds of organization. And then look back and say, okay, if that's the trend of our industry in general, given the fabric of compensation and data that we put in, you know, globally in place then how the architecture and technology and organizational structure incentives need to move to embrace that complexity. And to me that requires a paradigm shift a full stack from how we organize our organizations how we organize our teams, how we put a technology in place to look at it from a decentralized angle. >> I actually think we're in the midst of the transition to what's called a distributed cloud, where if you look at modernized cloud apps today they're actually made up of services from different clouds. And also distributed edge locations. And that's going to have a pretty profound impact on the way we go vast. >> We wake up every day, worrying about our customer and worrying about the customer condition and to absolutely make sure we dealt with the best in the first attempt that we do. So when you take the plethora of products we've dealt with in Azure, be it Azure SQL be it Azure cosmos DB, Synapse, Azure Databricks, which we did in partnership with Databricks Azure machine learning. And recently when we sort of offered the world's first comprehensive data governance solution and Azure overview, I would, I would humbly submit to you that we are leading the way. >> How important are rankings within the Google cloud team or are you focused mainly more on growth and just consistency? >> No, I don't think again, I'm not worried about we are not focused on ranking or any of that stuff. Typically I think we are worried about making sure customers are satisfied and the adding more and more customers. So if you look at the volume of customers we are signing up a lot of the large deals we did doing. If you look at the announcement we've made over the last year has been tremendous momentum around that. >> The thing that is really interesting about where we have been versus where we're going is we spend a lot of time talking about virtualizing hardware and moving that around. And what does that look like? And creating that as more of a software paradigm. And the thing we're talking about now is what does cloud as an operating model look like? What is the manageability of that? What is the security of that? What, you know, we've talked a lot about containers and moving into different, DevSecOps and all those different trends that we've been talking about. Like now we're doing them. So we've only gotten to the first crank of that. And I think every technology vendor we talked to now has to address how are they are going to do a highly distributed management insecurity landscape? Like, what are they going to layer on top of that? Because it's not just about, oh, I've taken a rack of something, server storage, compute, and virtualized it. I know have to create a new operating model around it in a way we're almost redoing what the OSI stack looks like and what the software and solutions are for that. >> And the whole idea of we in every recession we make things smaller. You know, in 91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year, 2000 windows the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards we moved from Unix servers to Wintel windows and Intel x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again, we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lib servers. And that's what we did in 2008, 2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There's nothing in the physical world that actually even lives but we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade. They're going to make it even smaller not just in space, which is size, with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. >> So I think the right way to think about edges where can you reasonably process the data? And it obviously makes sense to process data at the first opportunity you have but much data is encrypted between the original device say and the application. And so edge as a place doesn't make as much sense as edge as an opportunity to decrypt and analyze it in the care. >> When I think of Shift-left, I think of that Mobius that we all look at all of the time and how we deliver and like plan, write code, deliver software, and then manage it, monitor it, right like that entire DevOps workflow. And today, when we think about where security lives, it either is a blocker to deploying production or most commonly it lives long after code has been deployed to production. And there's a security team constantly playing catch up trying to ensure that the development team whose job is to deliver value to their customers quickly, right? Deploy as fast as we can as many great customer facing features. They're then looking at it months after software has been deployed and then hurrying and trying to assess where the bugs are and trying to get that information back to software developers so that they can fix those issues. Shifting left to me means software engineers are finding those bugs as they're writing code or in the CIC CD pipeline long before code has been deployed to production. >> During this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as they have the right requirements. So that goes back to people making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people and then the change management aspects right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how this change is going to be how it's going to affect, and then the adoption and an engagement, because adoption is critical because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective. But if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, what is a digital transformation or innovation? It still comes down to understand the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow our reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Okay, so look, there's so much other content on theCUBE on Cloud events site we'll put the link in the description below. We have other CEOs like Kathy Southwick and Ellen Nance. We have the CIO of UI path. Daniel Dienes talks about automation in the cloud and Appenzell from Anaplan. And a plan is not her company. By the way, Dave Humphrey from Bain also talks about his $750 million investment in Nutanix. Interesting, Rachel Stevens from red monk talks about the future of software development in the cloud and CTO, Hillary Hunter talks about the cloud going vertical into financial services. And of course, John Furrier and I along with special guests like Sergeant Joe Hall share our take on key trends, data and perspectives. So right here, you see the coupon cloud. There's a URL, check it out again. We'll, we'll pop this URL in the description of the video. So there's some great content there. I want to thank everybody who participated and thank you for watching this special episode of theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante and I'd appreciate any feedback you might have on how we can deliver better event content for you in the future. We'll be doing a number of these and we look forward to your participation and feedback. Thank you, all right, take care, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle. Okay, we're now going >>to explore what it's like to be the CEO of a fast paced growth company in Silicon Valley. And how the cloud, however, you wanted to find the cloud public cloud on Prem Hybrid, etcetera. How it supported that growth. And with me is Kathy Southwick, who is the CEO of pure storage. Kathy is really deep experience. Managing technology organizations spent a number of years overseeing A T and T s cloud planning and engineering and another few years overseeing a team of a Couple 1000 network and I T engineers working to break the physical stranglehold of fossilized telco networks, implementing network functions, virtualization and a software defined methodology for the company. And, of course, you spent the last couple of years is the CEO of Pure. So Cathy, it's great to see you again. Thank you for coming on the program. >>Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. >>You're very welcome. And so so >>given your >>experience with cloud, you know, dating back to really the early part of last decade. How did you look at cloud back then and how How is it evolved from your point of view? >>You know, it's Ah, it's an interesting question because I think that we've there's some things that have moved very fast and there's some some things that are very much the same as they were even a decade ago. I think that all companies are very focused on How do you think about Cloud? Do you think about it as on Prem? And when I started, we really were focused on an on Prem solution, and I'm in building an on Prem private cloud to help modernize our business. So I think that, you know, with that all companies are still in that same mindset of how do I want to think about Cloud? And how do I want to think about that on Prem versus Public versus, you know, combination or some type of hybrid solution? So I think all of us around that journey, it just seems like it's taken. It's probably a bit longer than most of us probably thought from beginning. >>So as a CEO thinking about that evolution, how has that informed the way you think about applying specifically the public cloud to pure business. >>You know, I think that we've been a for pure ourselves. I think we're in a really unique position. We were essentially born in the cloud. So we're, you know, company. That's 10 11 years old. And if I If I give the contrast of that of 18 t being, you know, 130 year old company Onda having a lot of applications that have, you know, lived historically on prim. There's very different issues and challenges that you have pure has had that. I think the advantage just like many other companies that were born in the cloud who have can see what advantages are very quickly. And we made decisions early on that said that we were gonna actually do both. We were gonna look to say, How do I put those applications in that in that data, whether it was on public or in on Prem and be able to do that both in the i t. Side as well as within the product side? So how we build our products now, >>as I mentioned up front, you have obviously a lot of experience managing large technology teams. My question is. When you first saw the emergence of the modern cloud, how did you communicate with your team members? I mean, you mentioned you were kind of building your own private cloud, so I guess that's less threatening to people. But what was it like? You know, Was there a concern? You know, with the eager to jump in? What was that dynamic like? And how did you manage >>it? You know, it's really it's a different depending on the different part of the organization. So I'll give you kind of two things I learned one of them was that our teams in the operation side, they saw it as a huge advantage. They saw it as an opportunity to really modernized to really get themselves both their own individual skill sets advanced, as well as provide a better level of service for our internal, you know, customer, so to speak. Our application in our data partners that we had to work with, um, they thought is an opportunity to bring agility to their applications quicker speed to market, um, or currency of their applications. So they actually got some benefits that they weren't. Actually, I'll call planning for they were they had the opportunity toe get investment in their applications without having to put the that investment on themselves. I would tell you the thing I learned from the teams, this is probably might be a little bit surprised. But often, you know, leaders believe like, you gotta have all the answers. You're gonna drive everything you're gonna let make sure everyone knows what needs to get done and what I actually found. This was actually one of my big moments, I think, was our Our individuals are employees are teams. They're so brilliant and so bright on driving change. And a lot of times leaders, I think, get in the way that so for cloud and adoption, it was really about me getting out of the way. It was really about setting that north star for where we want to go from the ability to deliver fast and quick for our business. And they get out of the way and let our teams actually drive. So it was a great, um, it was we actually actually saw the reverse. I saw more employees wanting to drive, and I needed to, like, back out and just say, Here's what we need to go. Let them drive us there. >>Alright, So I gotta ask you don't Please don't hate me for asking this question, but was your your gender and advantage was at a disadvantage. It wasn't really irrelevant in that regard. >>It was a relevant um, I think that it was I actually I truly believe it's irrelevant. I think it was literally recognizing that leaders need to set vision and what we want to achieve and let our letter of teams help us drive to get there. And I think that that is, you know, gender neutral. I think it's really about, you know, kind of checking your ego and everything else out to the side. And it's really about empowering people in our teams. Thio help drive us there. >>So thinking about that that learning specifically are there any similar tectonic shifts that you're you're seeing today where you can apply that experience? I'm just like, for instance, new modes of application development and requiring new skill sets are, or maybe another that you can think of. >>Yeah, I think I think honestly, it traverse is everything that we that we have to do as a you know, as a leader of a technology team, and whether you're in a high growth company like Pure or you're in a company that's trying to take costs out of your business or trying to, you know, do things. I think that it, um it really is a matter of leaders needing to set the stage. And so if we're trying to drive, you know, changing the business, it's really making sure that we're doing I'll calm or more empowering of our employees and they because they will see the way that we can get there. It's just a matter of, you know, letting them have that ability to do it. >>So you joined pure around two years ago and obviously growing very quickly. I love pandemic has changed the trajectory of that growth, but still good outlook. Um, but Silicon Valley fast paced company, you know, I kind of put it in the camp of the the work days, and the service now is that could have similar similar cultural patterns there. So you talked a little bit about this, but I wonder if we could come back and more specifically how you're leveraging cloud, how you're thinking about it, you know, on Prem Hybrid, Now the edge. And how did that contribute Thio Puros growth? >>Yeah, that za great question because I think that why I shared earlier, you know, we were essentially born in the cloud. I think that what it's really driven us is to be thinking more forward about where customers were going and what their challenges are. So whether it's for the I t. Teams on what we're trying to do to deliver for our business and, you know, innovation, they're obviously trying to make sure they can hit their revenue goals and all those things that important that every business deals with. But we also have that same mindset on how we develop our products. So it's really all driven by where the customer is going that they need data mobility. They need application mobility. They need really portability so that the moment that you have that ability where you can kind of control your destiny and define it, and you only could get that by having, you know, applications that are portable and data that is mobile and secure, that you have that kind of flexibility. So I think for pure we've been definitely in a great position to drive for our customers or drive where our customers are going. And so we have to find our entire product set. So not just how we operate as a business and run our business. But then how we define for our customers Same mindset is if our customers are going to the cloud that we need, have products that can help them to be in the cloud or be, you know, on print and let them decide what that looks like. Well, >>it's interesting you mentioned that and I hearken back to the The Port Works acquisition, which is an attempt to really change the way application development has done is another sort of approach Thio in a sort of modern data architecture, you, as the CEO of a technology company, most CEO, is that I know inside the tech companies that they're sort of the dog Fuding or champagne drinking, you know, testing. So So had you already started to sort of use that tech? Are you starting to, you know, Does it support that vision that you just put forth? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >>Yeah, It does. So we eso We had not been using port works as a za product. We were just starting down that path of looking at How do we do container ization for the applications that we do have on Prem? That's both in our engineering side as well as within I t. And so But we quickly have recognized, just like you know, And part of that acquisition is applications or companies won't have the ability to have that portability of their applications and have that flexibility that they're all striving for unless they've done things like containerized or applications made them that they're able to move them across different cloud environments, whether that's on Prem or off Prem or some hybrid eso for ourselves. You know, Port Works was a really critical acquisition, will help us on our own journey of doing the application, modernization and putting that keep those capabilities in place. But it will also enable our customers to have that same flexibility. So, again, going back to the we've adopt, these things aren't like a this is for this group, and this is for you know, this customer. It's really about how we operate both internally and then what we are providing for our customers so that portability and being able to have control of your own destiny, that's that's really to me what hybrid cloud is all about. And you can't really achieve that If you don't have some of these capabilities within your, you know, within kind of your toolbox. >>Great. Thank you for that. So I'm interested in is the head of, ah technology group at a tech company? And what are the meaningful differences? I mean, a lot of differences, but relative to CEO of a large telco or or other incumbent, you know, what are some of the good, the bad? And, uh, you know, the ugly, the differences. >>Yeah, you know, it's I meet with a lot of CEOs across Silicon Valley and we kind of joked that when you are working in a company that is a technology based company, you know, everybody knows how to dio, you know, because you do you have a brilliant engineers and and that they do know. I think the difference that you start to see is that you know, I t is, um is required to make sure that availability is their inherent in what you're doing on immediate roll out with like, you know, an application that's occurring. That's very different than how you do product lifecycle management. Um, what what we've what I've seen, actually, though, is more similarities. I know that's probably surprised to you, but coming out of a T and T, what I have been working on those last couple of years was actually doing the combination of engineering and I t into one organization and that you do have a lot of benefits for, for how you can then develop, how you can manage and the skill sets. There's a lot of similarities. So there's there's actually probably more similarities between companies and on what they're trying to achieve than than you would probably think there would be just because we're all trying to make sure that we can develop quickly. How about is >>it relates to cloud Cathy? I mean, I remember the early days of cloud, a lot of the big banks that we could build our own cloud. We can essentially compete at scale with with Amazon, where you know the big bank on. Then I think they quickly realized well, the economics actually don't favor us necessarily. Do you think there's a different perception about the use of cloud between sort of traditional incumbents and a tech company in Silicon Valley? And if so, how? >>So now I think that the if you are, you know, a bank is you refer to, and having it really is where you're starting from. If you have a very large infrastructure footprint and application footprint, your applications probably not born in the cloud. There's a lot of modernization that has to be done with those applications so that they could operate as efficiently in a public cloud as an example. And I think that's something that sometimes gets overlooked is there are enormous benefits going to public cloud. But there's also cost if your applications or your data doesn't really fit as well in that type of environment. So I think that for large enterprises like the banks, some of the telcos they've got very large footprints of infrastructure. Already, those investments have been made, and what they're really looking for is how doe I increase my ability to, you know, whether it's agility or its speed, or it's lower cost or it's all those things, and I think that's the That's a different path of different journey that they're on. So they're trying to balance all those equations of, you know, the economics as well as the ability to have, you know, no more investment or minimal investment in that infrastructure. For companies like Pure, where we started off of those investments are decision and kind of. The decision tree that we use is if it makes sense. And I don't have to make that investment on Prem for whatever reason, that I should go ahead and make that investment in a public cloud strategy or a hybrid cloud strategy kind. Differentiate that because I think that it's different depending on the company. You are, um, and so it really kind of depends on where you're starting from then. It also depends on what you're trying to achieve if you're just trying to achieve an economic solution. If you're trying to achieve a strategic solution, if you're trying to get agility. Andi, I think it is different for companies, and it's different depending where you're at in your kind of journey. So for a Silicon Valley company whose you know hyper growth, you know, one. We're very focused on abilities. You know everything from scale, because we've got to scale quickly. And those are things that we don't wanna have to start going and building all these data centers to go do that. We don't have those embedded investments. So it's Ah, it's a real difference in where your starting point is. And I think there I think there's value in in all those different type of approaches, >>right? And it's a real advantage for you that you don't have to shell out all that cap ex on Data Center. >>That's right. Um, as you look >>back at the last 10 years of cloud, you know, it was largely about eliminating the heavy lift of infrastructure deployment and SAS if I ng you know the business, what do you see? Going forward? What do you think the was gonna unfold in the 2020 is? Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you expect meaningful differences? >>I think that we're going to get better as, um as you know, technology leaders on how to quickly make decisions. Um, and not its have it less political. And I think Kobe is actually taught us a lot about that around companies more willing to make. I'll call it a A you know, a faster decision and remove some of the red tape. I've heard this from many of my peers that things that might have taken them months and months to get approved. Um, it's nowadays if even if they even have to go get approval. So I think that what we're going to see is we'll see the continuance of, um, you know, a public and I'll call really hybrid cloud type of solutions. And I think it will be more purposeful about what goes there and how. How that can help us toe, you know, I'll call it enable us much faster than we've been able to do it before. I think that's been our challenges. We've, you know, we get mired into some of the you know, the details of some of these things that maybe it would be easier for us to just make the decision to move forward than Thio. Keep going around around on what's the right way to do it. Yeah, >>so that's interesting. You're saying about the fast decisions? I felt like, ah, lot of 2020 was very tactical. Okay, go deal with the work from home, etcetera. Although you you definitely see I t spending, uh, suppressed in 2020. Our forecast was minus 4% but we're saying it's gonna grow. We actually see a decent snapback. You know, what are you seeing? Generally, Not even necessarily pure. But when you talk to some of your colleagues, you obviously in the technology business, it's good to be in the technology business these days. But to use do you see spending, you know, generally coming back And maybe the timing first half, maybe a little soft second. What are you seeing >>there? Yeah, almost identical wage that. I think that we'll see, you know, a little bit of, ah tendency toe, not really hold back, but really kind of see what's happening in the first quarter of the year. There's a lot, you know, going on with companies and everyone's having to kind of balance at what that looks like. I do see. And what I'm hearing from several of my peers is that, you know, it's not necessarily budget cuts. It might be budget re directions. It might be rude prioritization, but definitely technology investments are still there, and it's still important for businesses to keep on their journeys on. But we do see that even at pure as a way to differentiate ourselves in the market as well, do you? What >>about the work from home piece? I mean, prior to co vid, I think the average was about 15 or 16% of employees work from home. You know, now it's gotta be, you know, well, over in the high seventies, Onda CEO is that we've talked to suggest that, you know, that's gonna come down in the first half, maybe down toe, still pretty high 50 60%. But then eventually is gonna settle at a higher rate than it was pre pre covert. Maybe double that rate may be in the 30 35 maybe even 40%. You know? What are you expecting >>Something probably very similar. I think that what companies have recognized and I actually tell you CEO have thought this many of them for many years that there is a huge value value and having some type of hybrid model. There's value in having, you know, both from a business perspective as well as a personal perspective. So employees work life balance and trying to balance that. So I think that, you know, we a pure and myself, As you know the CEO hugely expect that we will see some type of you know, I'll call leveling off, figure out what's the right for the right group. And I think what we don't want to get into is, you know, Chris prescriptive that says, You know, this is what the company will look like as a whole. I think it really is going to come down to certain certain types of work are more conducive to a more work, remote environment others need to have. And I always kind of uses term of individual, you know, productivity versus team. You know, productivity. We've seen, you know, great advances and or individual productivity. A team productivity is still a challenge when you're still trying to do very collaborative, you know, brainstorming sessions. And so we are looking at capabilities to be able to enable our employees to do that. But there there's some things you just can't replace. The human interaction and ability to very quickly inter actively, you know, five minutes catch someone to do that. So I think we'll see. We'll see both. We'll see some leveling off, and I think we'll see some areas of businesses that have once thought You can't do that remote. They might actually say, Hey, that is work that commute remote So I think we'll see a combination of both. That's an >>interesting perspective on productivity. And what's the What's the old saying is You could go go faster alone. But further as a team and and not a lot of folks have been talking about that team productivity, we we clearly saw the hit the positive hit on productivity, especially in the in the technology business. So So my question then is so you expect? You know H Q doesn't go away. Maybe it gets, you know, maybe it gets smaller, Uh, but so is their pent up demand for technology spending at the headquarters. Because you've been you've been, you know, pushing tech out out to the edge out to the remote workers. Securing those remote workers figuring out better ways to collaborate is their pent up demand at H. Q. >>Um, absolutely. We've been, you know, we've been actually exploring different technologies. We've been uh, looking at what are things that you know could help create a different kind of experience, eh? So I do think it will be some different types of technology. Those would be the things that maybe aren't even out there developed yet on Have you create some of those comparable experiences. So I think that the notion of you know individuals will continue to thrive, but we've got to start working on How do we continue to enhance that? That team, um, collaborative productivity environment that looks and feels different than what it might look like today. Yeah. >>They got to leave it there. Great as always. Having you in the Cube. Thanks so much for participating in Cuban Cloud. >>Great. It's great to be here. Thank you. >>Keep it right there. Back more content right after this short break. >>Yeah.

>> Okay, we're now going to explore what it's like to be the CIO of a fast-paced growth company in Silicon Valley, and how the cloud, however you want to define the cloud, public cloud, on-prem, hybrid, et cetera, how it's supported that growth, and with me is Cathy Southwick, who is the CIO of Pure Storage. Kathy has really deep experience managing technology organizations. She spent a number of years overseeing AT&T's cloud planning and engineering, and another few years overseeing a team of a couple thousand network and IT engineers, working to break the physical stranglehold of fossilized telco networks, implementing network function virtualization and a software-defined methodology for the company, and of course, she's spent the last couple of years as the CIO of Pure, so Cathy, it's great to see you again. Thank you for coming on the program. >> Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. >> You're very welcome. And so, given your experience with cloud, you know, dating back to really the early part of last decade, how did you look at cloud back then, and how has it evolved, from your point of view? >> You know, it's an interesting question, 'cause I think that there's some things that have moved very fast, and there's some things that are very much the same as they were even a decade ago. I think that all companies are very focused on how do you think about cloud? Do you think about it as on-prem, and when I started, we really were focused on an on-prem solution, and building an on-prem private cloud to help modernize our business, so I think that with that, all companies are still in that same mindset of how do I want to think about cloud, and how do I want to think about that on-prem versus public, versus a combination or some type of hybrid solution? So, I mean, all of us are on that journey. It just seems like it's taken us probably a little bit longer than most of us probably thought from the beginning. >> So as a CIO, thinking about that evolution, how has that informed the way you think about applying specifically the public cloud to Pure's business. >> You know, I think that we've been a-- For Pure ourself, I think we're in a really unique position. We were essentially born in the cloud, so we're a company that's 10, 11 years old, and if I give the contrast of that of AT&T being you know, 130 year old company, and having a lot of applications that have, you know, lived historically on-prem, there's very different issues and challenges that you have. Pure has had, I think, the advantage, just like many other companies that are born in the cloud, who can see what the advantages are very quickly and we made decisions early on that said that we were going to actually do both. We were going to look to say how do I put those applications and that data, whether it was on public or on-prem, and be able to do that both in the IT side as well as within the product side, so how we develop our products. >> Now, as I mentioned up front, you have obviously a lot of experience managing large technology teams. My question is when you first saw the emergence of the modern cloud, how did you communicate with your team members? I mean, you mentioned you were kind of building your own private cloud, so I guess that's less threatening to people, but what was it like? Was there a concern? Were they eager to jump in? What was that dynamic like, and how did you manage it? >> You know, it's really, it's different depending on the different part of the organization, so I'll give you kind of two things I learned. One of them was that our teams on the operation side, they saw it as a huge advantage. They saw it as an opportunity to really modernize, to really get themselves, both their own, individual skill sets advanced, as well as provide a better level of service for our internal customer, so to speak. Our application and our data partners that we had to work with, they saw it as an opportunity to bring agility to their applications, quicker speed to market, and more currency of their applications, so they actually got some benefits that they weren't actually I'll call planning for. They had the opportunity to get investment in their applications without having to put that investment on themselves. I would tell you the thing I learned from the teams, this is probably, might be a little bit of a surprise, but often, you know, leaders believe you got to have all the answers, you got to drive everything. You're going to make sure everyone knows what needs to get done. What I actually found, this was actually one of my big moments, I think, was our individuals, our employees, our teams, they are so brilliant and so bright on driving change, and a lot of times leaders, I think, get in the way of it. So for cloud and adoption, it was really about me getting out of the way. It was really about setting that north star for where we want to go, from the ability to deliver fast and quick for our business, and then get out of the way and let our teams actually drive. So it was a great-- I actually saw the reverse. I saw more employees wanting to drive, and I needed to back out and just say here's where we need to go. Let them drive us there. >> All right, so I got to ask you. Please don't hate me for asking this question, but was your gender an advantage? Was it a disadvantage, or was it really irrelevant in that regard? >> I think it was irrelevant. I think that it was-- Actually, I truly believe it's irrelevant. I think it was literally recognizing that leaders need to set vision in what we want to achieve, and let our teams help us drive to get there, and I think that that is gender neutral. I think it's really about kind of chucking your ego and everything else out to the side, and it's really about empowering people and our teams to help drive us there. >> So thinking about that learning specifically, are there any similar tectonic shifts that you're seeing today, where you can apply that experience? Like for instance, new modes of application development, and acquiring new skill sets, or maybe another that you can think of. >> Yeah, I think honestly, it traverses everything that we have to do as a leader of a technology team, and whether you're in a high growth company like Pure, or you're in a company that's trying to take costs out of your business, or trying to do things, I think that it really is a matter of leaders needing to set the stage, and so if we're trying to drive you know, change in a business, it's really making sure that we're doing, I'll call it more empowering of our employees, 'cause they will see the way that we can get there. It's just a matter of letting them have that ability to do it. >> So you joined Pure around two years ago, and obviously growing very quickly. I know the pandemic has changed the trajectory of that growth, but still, a good outlook. But Silicon Valley, fast-paced company. You know, I kind of put it in the camp of the Workday and the ServiceNow. It's kind of similar cultural patterns there, so you talked a little bit about this, but I wonder if we could come back and more specifically, how you're leveraging cloud, how you're thinking about it, you know, on-prem, hybrid, now the edge, and how did that contribute to Pure's growth? >> You know, it's a great question because I think that-- Well, I shared earlier, we were essentially born in the cloud. I think that what it's really driven us is to be thinking more forward about where customers are going and what their challenges are. So whether it's for the IT teams on what we're trying to do to deliver for our business and innovation, they're obviously trying to make sure they can hit their revenue goals, and all of those things that are important that every business deals with, but we also have that same mindset on how we develop our products. So it's really all driven by where the customer is going, that they need data mobility, they need application mobility, they need really portability, so that the moment that you have that ability where you can kind of control your destiny and define it, and you only can get that by having applications that are portable and data that is mobile and secure, that you have that kind of flexibility. So I think for Pure, we have been definitely in a great position to drive for our customers, or drive where our customers are going, and so we've defined our entire product set, so not just how we operate as a business and run our business, but then how we define for our customers, same mindset is if our customers are going to the cloud, then we need to have products that can help them to be in the cloud, or be on-prem, and let them decide what that looks like. >> Well, it's interesting you mention that, and I hearken back to the Portworx acquisition, which is an attempt to really change the way application development is done. It's another sort of approach to sort of modern data architecture. As the CIO of a technology company, most CIOs that I know inside of tech companies, they're sort of the dog-fooding or champagne drinking, testing, so had you already started to use that tech? Are you starting to? Does it support that vision that you just put forth? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. >> Yeah, it does. So we had not been using Portworx as a product. We were just starting down that path of looking at how do we do containerization for the applications that we do have on-prem? That's both on our engineering side as well as within IT. But we quickly have recognized, just like you know, and part of that acquisition is applications, or companies, won't have the ability to have that portability of their applications and have that flexibility that they're all striving for unless they've done things like containerize their applications, made them that they're able to move them across different cloud environments, whether that's on-prem or off-prem, or some hybrid. So for ourselves, you know, Portworx was a really critical acquisition that will help us on our own journey of doing the application modernization and putting those capabilities in place, but it will also enable our customers to have that same flexibility, so again going back to the-- These things aren't like this is for this group and this is for this customer. It's really about how we operate, both internally and then what we are providing for our customers. So that portability and being able to have control of your own destiny, that's really, to me, what hybrid cloud is all about, and you can't really achieve that if you don't have some of these capabilities within your toolbox. >> Great, thank you for that. So I'm interested, as the head of a technology group at a tech company, and what are the meaningful differences? I mean there are a lot of differences, but relative to CIO of a large telco, or other incumbent, you know, what are some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the differences? >> Yeah, you know, it's-- I meet with a lot of CIOs across Silicon Valley, and we kind of joke that when you are working in a company that is a technology based company, you know, everybody knows how to do-- Because you do, you have brilliant engineers, and they do know. I think the difference that you start to see is that IT is required to make sure that availability is there inherent in what you're doing on immediate rollout with like, you know, an application that's occurring. That's very different than how you do product life cycle management. What I've seen actually though, is more similarities. I know that's probably a surprise to you, but coming out of AT&T, what I had been working on those last couple of years was actually doing the combination of engineering and IT into one organization, and that you do have a lot of benefits for how you can then develop, how you can manage, and the skillsets. There's a lot of similarities, so there's actually probably more similarities between companies on what they're trying to achieve than you would probably think there would be, just because we're all trying to make sure that we can develop quickly. >> How about as it relates to cloud, Cathy? I mean, I remember in the early days of cloud, a lot of the big banks said we can build our own cloud. We can essentially compete at scale with Amazon. We're the big bank. And then I think they quickly realized well, the economics actually don't favor us necessarily. Do you think there's a different perception about the use of cloud between sort of traditional incumbents and a tech company in Silicon Valley, and if so, how so? >> I think that the-- If you are a bank, as you refer to, and having-- It really is where you're starting from. If you have a very large infrastructure footprint and application footprint, your applications probably are not born in the cloud. There's a lot of modernization that has to be done with those applications so that they can operate as efficiently in a public cloud, as an example. And I think that's something that sometimes gets overlooked, is there are enormous benefits with going to public cloud, but there's also costs if your applications or your data doesn't really fit as well in that type of environment. So I think that for large enterprises like the banks, some of the telcos, they've got very large footprints of infrastructure already. Those investments have been made, and what they're really looking for is how do I increase my ability to, whether it's agility or it's speed, or it's lower costs, or it's all those things, and I think they've got the different path, a different journey that they're on, so they're trying to balance all those equations of the economics, as well as the ability to have no more investment or minimal investment in that infrastructure. For companies like Pure, where we started off with those investments, our decision, and kind of the decision tree that we used is if it makes sense and I don't have to make that investment on-prem for whatever reason, then I should go ahead and make that investment in a public cloud strategy or a hybrid cloud strategy, and I'll kind of differentiate that, because I think that it's different depending on the company you are. And so, it really kind of depends on where you're starting from, and then it also depends on what you're trying to achieve, if you're just trying to achieve an economic solution, if you're trying to achieve a strategic solution, if you're trying to get agility, and I think it's different for companies and it's different depending where you're at in your journey. So for a Silicon Valley company who's hyper-growth, you know, one, we're very focused on agility, everything from scale, because we've got to scale quickly, and those are things that we don't want to have to start going and building all these data centers to go do that. We don't have those embedded investments, so it's a real difference in where your starting point is, and I think there's value in all those different type of approaches. >> Right, and it's a real advantage for you that you don't have to shell out all that cap-ex on data centers. >> That's right. >> As you look back at the last 10 years of cloud, it was largely about eliminating the heavy lift of infrastructure deployment, and SaaSifying the business. What do you see going forward? What do you think is going to unfold in the 2020s? Is it going to be more of the same, or do you expect meaningful differences? >> I think that we're going to get better as technology leaders on how to quickly make decisions and have it less political, and I think COVID's actually taught us a lot about that around companies more willing to make, I'll call it a faster decision, and remove some of the red tape. I've heard this from many of my peers, that things that might have taken them months and months to get approved, it's now days, even if they even have to go get approval, so I think that what we're going to see is, we'll see the continuance of public and I'll call it really hybrid cloud type of solutions, and I think it will be more purposeful about what goes there and how that can help us to you know, I'll call it enable us much faster than we've been able to do it before. I think that's been our challenge is we've-- You know, we get mired into some of the details of some of these things that maybe it would be easier for us to just make the decision and move forward than to keep going round and round on what's the right way to do it. >> Yeah, so that's interesting, what you're saying about the fast decisions. I felt like a lot of 2020 was you know, very tactical. Okay, go deal with the work from home, et cetera, although you definitely see IT spending suppressed in 2020. Our forecast was -4%, but we're saying it's going to grow. We actually see a decent snap back. You know, what are you seeing generally, not even necessarily Pure, but when you talk to some of your colleagues? You're obviously in the technology business. It's good to be in the technology business these days, but do you see spending generally coming back, and maybe the timing? First half maybe a little soft, second half-- What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, almost identical to what you said. I think that we'll see a little bit of a tendency to not really hold back, but really kind of see what's happening in the first quarter of the year. There's a lot going on with companies, and everyone's having to kind of balance that and what that looks like. I do see, and what I'm hearing from several of my peers is that you know, it's not necessarily budget cuts. It might be budget redirections, it might be reprioritization, but definitely technology investments are still there, and it's still important for businesses to keep on their journeys, and we do see that even at Pure, as a way to differentiate ourselves in the market as well. >> What about the work from home piece? I mean, prior to COVID, I think the average was about 15 or 16% of employees worked from home. You know, now it's got to be well over in the high 70s, and the CIOs that we've talked to suggest that that's going to come down in the first half, maybe down to still pretty high, 50, 60%, but then eventually it's going to settle at a higher rate than it was pre-COVID, maybe double that rate, maybe in the 30, 35, maybe even 40%. What are you expecting? >> Something probably very similar. I think that what companies have recognized, and I actually tell you, CIOs have thought this, many of them for many years, that there's a huge value in having some type of hybrid model. There's value in having, both from a business perspective as well as a personal perspective, so employees' work-life balance and trying to balance that. So I think that we at Pure, and myself as the CIO, hugely expect that we will see some type of I'll call it leveling off, figuring out what's the right for the right group, and I think what we don't want to get into is a prescriptive that says this is what the company will look like as a whole. I think it really is going to come down to certain types of work are more conducive to a more work remote environment. Others need to have, and I always kind of use this term of individual productivity versus team productivity. We've seen great advances in individual productivity. Team productivity is still a challenge when you're still trying to do very collaborative brainstorming sessions, and so we are looking at capabilities to be able to enable our employees to do that, but there's some things you just can't replace the human interaction and the ability to very quickly, interactively, you know, five minutes, catch someone and do that. So I think we'll see both. We'll see some leveling off, and I think we'll see some areas of businesses that had once thought you can't do that remote, they might actually say hey, that is work that can be remote, so I think we'll see a combination of both. >> That's an interesting perspective on productivity, and what's the old saying, is you can go faster alone, but further as a team. And not a lot of folks have been talking about that team productivity. We clearly saw the hit, the positive hit on productivity, especially in the technology business, so my question then is, so you expect, you know, HQ doesn't go away. Maybe it gets smaller, but so is there pent-up demand for technology spending at the headquarters? 'Cause you've been pushing tech out to the edge, out to the remote workers, securing those remote workers, figuring out better ways to collaborate. Is there pent-up demand at HQ? >> Absolutely, we've been-- You know, we've been actually exploring different technologies. We've been looking at what are things that could help create a different kind of experience? And it'll be some different types of technology. Those will be the things that maybe aren't even out there developed yet, on how do you create some of those comparable experiences? So I think that the notion of individuals will continue to thrive, but we've got to start working on how do we continue to enhance that team, collaborative productivity environment that looks and feels different than what it might look like today. >> Cathy, got to leave it there. Great, as always, having you on the CUBE. Thanks so much for participating in CUBE on Cloud. >> Great, it was great to be here, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Back with more content right after this short break.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Hello everyone and welcome to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio. I'm your host hosting alongside of Dave Volante. David's so great to be here with you. I'm so excited to get into this. See Rebecca, so we were, we would use came from the keynote. A lot of high profile UI path executives and important customers were on there too, but then this is the message is it's time to reboot work. It's time to reboot your business, transformed the customer experience, transform the employee experience. I'm wondering as someone who spent a lot of time at these kinds of conferences, and here's a lot of this, these, this kind of messaging, especially in this age of digital transformation, how compelling do you find this value proposition, this, this idea that RPA, robotics, processing automation can do these things? >>The first thing I would mention, Rebecca, is to me it's all about the customers. And you know, it's rare that you see a tech show start with the customers to actually do in the intro. I've seen it before. Nutanix actually does it at his shows, but it's, but it's quite rare because you know, the vendors want to put their message out, they want to control everything, and so they're very, very cautious about that. But, so we had three customers up on stage today doing the intro, which I thought was kind of cool. Tech shows, you know, a lot of smoke, a lot of mirrors and so forth. So you have to try to squint through that. I would say this, it's very clear that the age of automation is here. You know, people have been always concerned about automation for good reason. They're afraid that automation is gonna take away their jobs. >>Having said that, machines have always replace humans. We've talked about this a lot on the cube, but this is the first time in history that machines are replacing humans with cognitive tasks. So that's got to be scaring people a little bit. But when you come back and answer your question, when you talk to customers, they're really happy about software robots because they're doing, they're automating mundane tasks that these folks don't want to do on a day to day basis and they want to do other things. They want to get their weekends back. They don't want to just manually enter data from spreadsheets into applications and back and forth. And so from that standpoint, I think it is real and it is unique. You know, the big question is how much of this is transformational and is it really a path to AI something that UI path and others are really pointing towards and we're going to explore that, >>right? I mean in what you were just saying too is that that that the company's pitch is that we are freeing people. We are liberating them from the mundane, from the drudgery, from the data entry. And as you, as you pointed out, rightfully, a lot of the customers are saying, Oh no, it's giving our time. It's giving our employees time back to focus on the higher level tasks, the more creative aspects of their job. But, but I wonder if it is in fact a w what it really is doing. Two jobs. I mean I think that there was a really telling line in that Forbes profile of uh, Daniel Dina's who is the, the CEO of this company is founder of this company. The first ever bought billionaire exactly. Um, where it was an MIT professor quoted saying, you know, we always say to the companies that we say, give, give us your data and we'll tell you if it is in fact, uh, having this job killing effect. And he said, the companies don't want to give, give that up. >>Right? So now just look at the why is Daniel didn't as a billionaire, it will here, here, here's why. >>Yeah, walk, walk us through this. >>So UI path is up to 3,400 employees. 34 50 is the actual number. Now back in 2017, two years ago, this company did $25 million in annual recurring revenue. Now, ARR is a metric that's very important because you know, even though you book, let's say you book a $12,000 deal, you recognize that $1,000 a month over the 12 month period. So ARR is a very really important metric. So 25 million in 2017 my sources indicate that they'll do over 300 million this year in ARR. So we're talking about a 12 X plus increase in a two year period. They've raised $1 billion. One of their key competitors, automation anywhere has raised similar amounts of money. So they're talking about a couple of billion dollars raised just in the last couple of years. UI past valuation in March was $7 billion. So at that kind of back of napkin, and we're talking about a $10 billion valuation, Daniel obviously owns a lot of that. >>So 20% yeah. So it's, it's pretty substantial in terms of the market impact. Now valuations, as you all know, it's a fleeting metric, right? It comes in, it goes, but so the, but the landscape is very strong right now. It's really interesting to see how much customers are glomming onto this automation tailwind. The other comment I would make is let's lay out the sort of competitive landscape. UI path has gone from kind of a clear third in the marketplace to clear number one. I mean they're kind of separating from the pack, but there are others automation anywhere, blue prism and there are a number of legacy customers as well >>that that's what I wanted to ask you too, is that we have seen a few Microsoft and Google of course are, are, are partnered in their, in their customers, but they also are moving into this area themselves. So I mean will you will let UI path be able to maintain its competitive position as these very established and frankly very smart companies move into this area. Safety's >>another one. SAP bought an RPA company. It's a good question, but, so if you look at, let me start with this sort of underlying trend. If you look at the spending data, so we have access to the enterprise technology, research spending data and it shows the entire space is gaining share relative to other technology initiatives. So when you look at the data for UI path automation, anywhere blue prism, even legacy process automation companies like Pega systems, they're all actually from a spending standpoint attracting a lot of attention. So it's this rising tide lifts all ships. It's still somewhat early in terms of this next generation RPA if you will, you I-PASS advantage is simplicity. They are totally focused on this. You see this all the time. Do we go best of breed or do we go with a suite? So if Oracle comes up with an RPA solution, they throw it in for free, you know, does a customer take that? >>I think it comes down to what the business value is and that's something we're going to explore. It's not uncommon in detect industry that there's a first mover advantage or maybe it's a second mover advantage. You know, Facebook wasn't really first mover, but the one who really gets it right is kind of a winner take most. And so that's where a UI path is going like crazy right now. Trying to scale the company, raise a bunch of money. We saw this week a bunch of bankers sort of sniffing around. All the bankers are here cause they want their business. So I would expect there's some kind of IPO on the horizon, which I think they need to do to be, to your point to be able to compete with the big guys. So bottom line is they have to do it on a better product, more openness, moving faster and getting to scale. And I think they'll be able to reach escape velocity. I don't know if there's enough room for the big three. I would expect that given the spending climate is very good for everybody right now. I would expect within the next two to three years, some consolidation in this space. >>Well. So one of the things that you had just talked about with this next generation RPA, and that is exactly where we're going because these bots have got to become more durable, more smarter and more capable of handling complex tasks. We saw a number of new product announcements today. Oh, I might to get your thoughts and what you think about them and just whether or not they will have this transformational effect. Um, so, so yes, we have some new product announcements, some, some that democratize automation building that all you have to do is know how to run an Excel spreadsheet and you too can build an automation in your company. >>Yeah. It'll take a little bit of training though. >>I know. I think a better idea for those those demos is they should just pluck someone out of the audience and say, okay, you're going to do this. >>No, they would fail. I mean, let's say said, I remember the first time you learned Excel, I'm old enough to remember slash file, retrieve, paste, copy, whatever. You had to go through some training and we went through classes back in the eighties I think it's a similar here. I mean it's not overly complex. It's gonna have a low code theme, but you're right, UI path announced the number of new products. You know, we looked at this a couple of years ago, we went, we went out and we took the big three from the Forrester wave blue prism automation anywhere in UI path and we said, Hey, let's download them and start building some, some, some automations. While the only software we could get ahold of was UI path. Because as they say, they had kind of a simpler or more open model. The other guys were like, well, talk to a reseller is spend some money. >>And we were like, no, we just want to try it before we buy it. And we weren't able to get the other guy software. Now I think automation anywhere has made some strides in that regard in terms of simplification. You know, it's a copycat industry like the NFL. But so let's remember here we're talking about automating mundane tasks. Relatively simple automations. The customers are asking for things like more complex automations. How do we prioritize the automations? How do we figure out where, what's the best bang for the buck? How do we actually have attended bots because many of these are unintended. They'd like to have the human injected into the equation and that's pretty interesting because it brings forth this augmentation scenario that's everybody's talking about in AI and that starts to move us from sort of this tactical, I'm going to save some time on a use case specific or a technology specific automation to something that's more strategic that I can scale across my organization but right now people are saving money on this as a super hot space. As I say, all the bankers are trying to get in because they know some other ideas are coming down the road and the VCs I'm sure are gonna want the air exits. >>I want to talk to you about the leadership of this company. This is Daniel Dienes and you have interviewed him many times. Do minimun has as well. He he, he seems like a different kind of CEO. I mean, first of all, he is, he's a Romanian. Uh, he grew up, uh, behind the iron curtain. Uh, he was a professional bridge player for awhile, at least play competitive bridge player play competitive bridge and now he is a company headquartered in New York city. He still spends a lot of time in Bucharest but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about his leadership style and the kind of culture he's created at UI path and whether or not, because he's made some key hires from AWS, from Google, some, some of the more established tech players, whether or not he is, whether or not he'll be able to keep that startup culture, that startup mindset as the company becomes so much bigger. Well >>I think it's a concern and something that we want to ask about when you ask Daniel about, you know, how have you been able to do this? He'll talk about the mistakes that they made, how they sort of, they had a build it and you and they shall come mentality, which is kind of kind of old thinking these days and they sort of lucked into this RPA space. He also emphasize, emphasize as humble, and he's a very humble guy. I mean, you'll, you'll, you'll meet him I think last year he came on and you know, he's a developer. He had a tee shirt on. He's a coder right now. He's a billionaire coder. So maybe, maybe he'll, he'll dress up a little bit, but you know, maybe a fancy tee shirt, I don't know. Or maybe a collared shirt that says UI path on it. We'll see. >>But so they end, they want to move fast. They believe in openness there. They believe in transparency. I think those things worked in today's marketplace. People love the guy. I mean the customers love them. The employees love them. As you said, they're pulling people in from the hottest companies. Google, AWS. We, I got a on the shoulder today from, from a gentleman and I know from Google, he was in sales at Google. It's not me. There's no, Oh, I'm day three. And so people want to be part of this, this rocket ship. And I think it's gonna move very, very fast. Like I say, I think you're going to see some moves in the marketplace. I think you're going to see some exits and consolidations. We saw some M and a today UI path announced the acquisition of company called process gold that actually competes with a partner of UI path. So it's again, people are going to be on collision courses and they recently made another acquisition of a company called step shots and we're seeing some M and a, you know, relatively small MNA, but it's all about how can they transform from this little startup to this major player. To your point that can compete with the Microsofts and the SAP and the big whales of the world. >>And what do you think is his bigger selling point? Is it that it is transforming the employee experience, which as we know that that should not be discounted because an employee who is doing less mundane tasks able to focus on the more creative interesting parts of his or her job is a happier employee, happier your employees, more productive employee. A more productive employee means a healthier bottom line. So that's now funding to discount. Also the customer experience, as you said, which is clearly a huge top priority for this company. But, but I think the question is, is this technology now is a transformative enough? >>You know, as you asked that question, it kind of reminds me in a different way of a company that we've followed for years service now. When service now first came out, it was kind of doing what people saw as help desk, improving help desk, and they disrupted an industry and they made it better, which is kind of boring. It's kind of mundane, but actually having good it where you're not constantly down and you're not complaining and stuff's not falling through the cracks actually can be somewhat transformative. Kind of boring, but really important. And I see a similar sort of pattern here now the vision is, you know, a robot for every worker and the path to AI and we'll see. But right now the trans, the transformation is we're going to take away all this crap that you hate doing all these crap locations or mundane tasks and we're going to make your life better. >>And people workers want that and it's going to be in theory, a productivity boost as a result of that. That in and of itself, I think Rebecca can be transformative because it'll, it'll help with morale, it'll help with culture, it'll allow people to shift their emphasis on more strategic work and drive more value for the companies. And so, and I think companies that invest in RPA are, are seeing returns in terms of quality, just in terms of employee morale. You'll hear that from the customers that we talked to today. So I think in that sense it can be transformative like service now was now can it take the next step or is this really just paving the cow path? Is it just taking mundane known processes, automating them as opposed to really rethinking what process automation should look like. And that's some of the criticism of RPA and the RPA hype. And you know, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk to customers about that. We've got analysts from HFS coming on, Kathy from Gartner's coming on. So excited to hear their perspectives as well. >>Exactly. And I, I want to reiterate that point that you're absolutely right. Their question is should we actually think about redesigning the process itself rather than automating the, the the flawed process? >>Yeah, and I mean I guess part of me says yes strategically we should be doing that, but another part of me says, look, I don't have to change anything. And I think that's the big advantage of UI path and these other players is you can basically automate what you have today. You don't have to redesign the process because process redesign is a heavy lift. So if I don't have to do a heavy lift, if I can improve what I'm doing today and it works, yeah, it's the old, if it ain't broke, why fix it, but just improve it. I think that's a very powerful, I think the big question I have is, is that like a big hit of a step function or is it really transformative? I feel like today's tech is a step function, which is important. You're going to get that step function, but I think you're going to absorb that benefit fast and then people are going to say, okay, now what? >>Another good example is virtualization. When I first saw virtualization and the ability to spin up a server, my jaw dropped and went, Oh my God, I could spin up a server in five minutes and it used to take weeks, months to spin up a server. That's game changing. Nobody talks about virtualization anymore. It was a, you know, a five year absorption of productivity for it and now it's like, yeah, I've been there, done that. That's yesterday's news. I think the same thing is going to happen with today's RPA and the big question is can they cross that strategic chasm into what the gentleman from Pepsi, the executive from Pepsi was saying, this automation fabric across the enterprise as a, as a platform for automation and artificial intelligence. That's a big leap. These guys get big plans. Daniel Dienes is a big thinker, go big or go home. So I don't, I don't have the crystal ball on that, I think, but I think there's a decent opportunity given that there's enough attention on this business right now that it, that it could be transformed. >>All right, well, hopefully we'll know more at the end of these two days. Dave, I've, I'm looking forward to getting into with you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Stay tuned for more. You're watching the cube.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering your storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Hey, welcome back to the cubes. Coverage day to appear. Storage your accelerate 2019. I'm Lisa Martin Day. Volante is my co host, and we're very pleased to welcome for the first time to the Cube. Kathy Southwark. This C I O at pure Cathy. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. You have a great story. This is not only your fear. Your first your accelerate. You been at the company less than a year. You were not only a pure customer before, but in a completely different industry. So your first your accelerate. Here we are in Delhi Technologies backyard. Give us your perspective on appears business from your previous customer role. >> Yes. So I spent. I've been here just under a year, she said, and I spent the almost 22 years 18 t and coming into a company. It's completely different. Different size company, different size technology issues. Everything we do is looks very different. But there's a lot of similarities that, you know, you're trying to as any company trying to innovate and trying to stay on the cutting edge and you're trying to make sure you have the right teams in place and all that, so it's a lot of fun. It's great to see the energy and the excitement here, so that's been a lot of fun to come in and to see orange everywhere painted or so it's been a lot of fun coming on >> and you're complying with your orders. >> I got the memo. I said, You know, it's hard because orange is not one of my better colors toe where but no happy toe, happy to wear orange and proud to be part of such a company who's really looking at? How do we take care of the customer? >> Right. So you were sold on pure as a customer when you were with age and T. What was it about the technology that when you were in that prayer roll that really differentiated it from its competition? It was really >> interesting. I was sharing folks earlier today that here was very different, smaller company coming into a very large organization. We started working with them back in 18 t in 2013 so they were a very small company, very early on, but they were so bullish they had this completely different attitude about storage. And it wasn't really necessarily about this storage. It's about what we're gonna do to help you change your business. So for us, you know, I really looked at when you're in a very large company, you tend to not look so much at the particular like storage or computer or what you're really looking at, How many enabling my business and with the limited dollars that you have. And resource is etcetera, you're always trying to balance and prioritize. So for us when they came in, they made this proposition and said, Hey, we can show you this in two weeks and it'll, um And you know, when you're also big enterprise, you don't have time. Thio look a technology for weeks and months on end and then have to test it. And so we brought pure end. They they were tested out the products within two weeks, and we saw more than what we're expecting. And I think that was what changed for us is it wasn't just about we could do, you know, compression. We could do the deed if we could do. It was that all of a sudden was all these other capabilities been planned for So it really was. It was pretty pretty dramatic for us because we hadn't seen other providers to come in with a story that sounded different and not just the technology. Like I'm gonna save you a dollar. It's about now I'm going to enable your business to do something different faster. And we saw it firsthand. >> I was the role of C i o at a technology company. Different from you were in a c i o N a t. But you you had kind of an engineering roll. If I think it's a solution Engineering, how is the role different in terms of how you spend your time and what you care about? >> Yeah. So, you know, in 18 t, the CEOs were focused on the application delivery sites of specific applications at pure and so an 82. My role is centered around all the infrastructure for I t. As well as our network engineering. So what we did for the Service Writer network coming into pure, you have, you know, the whole spectrum. But we're a different kind of company. and that really 10 years old. Our technical debt looks very different. We use a lot of sass products, so we use a lot of hosted solutions from our partners and providers, and we do someone premise well. But it's a very different kind of landscape, so the opportunity is you don't have as much technical debt. You also have the ability to to try things because you are smaller and you can try things much quicker and be able to say, Well, this working isn't good enough and not have to have maybe things as gold plated. As you know, a regulated telecom would have versus a product technology product company that it's trying to be very agile to produce things and change for their customers. >> So essentially you were. I'll call you the C i o of of infrastructure at AT and T with infrastructure that had to support, like you said, highly regulated in a very diverse I'm sure application portfolio. Extremely there. Thousands of systems, probably >> thousands of applications and very complex business models. They, you know, they're ah, it's not a one. So the interesting is 80. >> She's >> not a one entity business, you know they've got their media business. They've got there mobility business. We've got their wireline business. So when you have people often think of 18 t as a company, But there's actually it's a very complex business model supporting multiple products. So it's just that those air, you know, multi $1,000,000,000 product portfolios versus coming into pure where you know we're still, you know, 1,000,000,000 have company building and growing our product portfolio. >> So what's your technology strategy of pure and how are you enabling business outcomes for the company? >> That's a great, great question. So, you know, really, a business strategy here has been that I t has to really evolve and scale differently than it had in the past. The organization before was really centered around Some of the end user capabilities wasn't as centered around business outcomes, and we've taken on a different role. So as I've come on to the organization, our opportunity and our challenge is that we now have different responsibilities, were taking on things like, How do we want to think about data across the enterprise, not just within each individual domain, and so as a start up company, you often are very focused on your R and D investments in your sales and marketing investments, and you do a lot of things to get it done. And that means that individual teams will do work. But you tend to not think about what the full life cycle is of, you know, of something that you're working on. So for our opportunity now this is take a step back, be able to look across and say it worked great for that period of time. Now we have the opportunity to rethink how we want to think about the customer experience from the time product is developed all the way through and, you know, a quote to a customer through its life cycle through delivery and then the support for that customer >> so so technology, the support that sort of workflow >> the ecosystem instead of within individual areas. And so that's really there are focuses. How do we help our business to become even faster? How do we get more focused on the customer from ah whole ecosystem? And that we think about the customer from the whole ecosystem instead of each individual area? >> Sounds like that horizontal view that Charlie Giancarlo talks about you know, with storage being so vertical in the past and cures wanting to revolutionize that and make that horizontal, ensuring that any type of business, whether we're talking about yours, business or ah retailer or our airline, every function in an organization has access to share. That data exactly struck business value to lower costs to find new revenue streams, new routes to market, et cetera. >> And we're no different as a business. We need to do those same things to make sure that we can. We can deliver those for business, so that's a big part of a lot of >> times we'll talk to C. I ose that technology companies and their large established technology companies that I think Cisco S A P. They've been around a long time. They have a lot of technical debt. They look a lot like your customers, frankly, many of your customers yours ever. But my question is a lot of these c I ose that I've just mentioned, sort of generically there come wine tasters, right? You know, they used to be dog food or his drink your own champagne, but But they they are like the first line of defense verse beta customer, and they give feedback to the product groups. Do you play that role as well? >> Way do we not probably to the extent, because we're a smaller company. So we tend Thio, as with our product announcements we've made will go out to a wide set of our customers, you know? So I think we had 16 1 of the bait is that was just done. What we do with an I T. Is because we have a smaller footprint just the size we do have flash ray with a flash blade with you do use pure one. We do it Maur of ah, from how would a a smaller customer look at it, Think about it and use it. And so that's tends to be the I'll say, the lens that we look through. I think that the role I've played coming in is the bringing a perspective from a larger enterprise on how does a larger enterprise an I t. Think about it and it's again. It's not just your helping me with storage. You're actually helping me to solve a business problem. So there's s oh, there's some other and some of the leaders that we've brought in. They also come from outside industry. Some have used pure, some have not, and so have that different kind of lens of what you know we would expect to see from our product seems, but they're also extremely open. Thio. What do you think? What is I t thinking about how you were thinking about these product ideas? What what's the input from I T. So there's a lot of what we're very small from a nightie organization. I think that the two way communication is what it's gonna you know, what will help, >> what are some of the innovations? And I know you've only had a short tenure there, but one of the things I read in the Q two earnings but that we're just released last month in August was seven. That new customers added per business safer pierce of 450 or so, plus customers at it in that quarter but also a 50% increase in multimillion dollar deals. So, enterprise, any innovations that you can share since you've been on board that your team has helped cure, understood to be able to go after those large enterprise multimillion dollar deals directly. >> Well, certainly from, um, you know, from a you know, a personal understanding of the product and what here could do it scale is, you know, I certainly have that perspective to share with our customers and bringing that confidence and credibility that, you know, if you are looking at a large enterprise customer in the opportunity, they have a lot of questions about. So how exactly did 18 t do it? It's not like they run a few arrays. They run hundreds and hundreds of rays and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes. So there's It's not like it's a proof of concept or a pilot. And it's been years of doing upgrades, non disruptive Lee over the years, with all the pure upgrades that have come into play. So I can certainly bring that to the table with helping the customers to get it, you know, a little bit of confidence, but also just an understanding about how pure is approaching it with these other large customers. So and as you've talked to other customers, there's there's enough customers out there that are, you know, very, >> very eager to >> share because they're so excited about what it's done for their business. We've >> heard. Sorry, David, I was going to say on the customer front we've, what 6600 plus customers pure now has in its 1st 10 years. And the customers we've spoken to the last two days, Dave and I have noticed that a common theme is they're talking about their overall experience with the technology. They're not talking about boxes and array names, and all these specifics are talking about how they are able to one customer from, ah, legal firm, I think in Florida didn't even do a PC had appear. That was a pure customer. And from that piers advice. I got it right on board and was really talking about the experience and all of the things to your point on the business side that they're able to to influence with the technology, not talking about speeds and feeds and arrange drives and things like that. So it's very, very different conversation. >> It's S O. It's interesting because and the role that I had, I had the teams that did the architecture, planning, design and through implementation. So the operation teams one of the most unique things I've said I share with customers is when you are in a technology and you're in a large enterprise, you tend to have a challenge with introducing new technology because you don't want more technical debt. It doesn't matter what you just don't want more technical debt. So typically your operation teams are >> doing a little >> bit of pushback on you. No, no, we don't need something new. No, we don't need unless they're having significant outages or incidents that they're trying to solve for what I found. And even to this day, there is some of the folks there actually around the floor here. The folks that were in operations, they were literally coming and saying, We want more pure And so when you're in a technology organisation that typically doesn't happen. It's S o it wasn't And it wasn't like we want more of like you said the array, it was we just want we don't wanna have to worry about. And I just took a reduction of my head count. So I want I find you have to take on more data and I am. You take on more support for the business. I don't have to worry about it. And so to have that. That's a very different. And we had the same experience of their application team saying, Hey, I just got lower latents. So they didn't actually know why. They just knew that when I was trying to do my work on the application side, working within a database, all the sudden I had all this improvement and, um and so what? We allowed them to sit. Okay, well, we'll give you more capabilities, more future functionality. And that doesn't happen. Before, those were things were like, really like operations and application teams are gonna work as a team together. Very different. I'm experience. >> So if I were a pure sales rep, I would say, >> Kathy, can you come tell my customers my prospect that >> story to the sales reps have access to your calendar? How much of your time? How much time you spend, you know, sales folks wanting you to tell stories like I got >> so the I have no the company that long. So I have I have spent a fair amount of my time talking to customers. But, you know, we also have a lot of work with an I t. And so are you know it's there just is incentive to have me work with an i. T. Because I can understand what we need to do to help our field as well. And that's one of our objectives is what are we gonna do an I t. To make it that much easier and better for not just our sales teams but the manufacturing teams. The support teams are hardware, teams, all the teams that takes a deliver. And so, you know, in fairness, I have joked with some that have stopped me and said, Hey, we need to I said, Remember, we also want to deliver for you so that to make your jobs easier So there's a balance >> that it's different. A technology company writes kind of encouraged that the C I. O goes out and evangelize is >> Yeah, it's actually a lot of fun. I, uh I I do joke that when I go out to talkto the other CEOs, I mean, they're my people there, too. I know it's It's the challenges that we have to deal with. The you know, you're dealing with the technology, those very specific items, then you're dealing with that. How do we help my business and then you're dealing with. I want to make sure I'm doing the right things for people development and all those so and you have a lens across the entire enterprise. So it's not like you're just looking at sales or you're just looking at ops for your You're kind of looking at everything to say, Well, how do I help all the teams to be that much better? Because the better we are, you know, be cliche. You know, collectively, that just got is gonna enable pure toe to do more fun. >> So what's on the minds of your peers in these days? >> You know, I feel so fortunate to be in the Bay Area, and there are amazing CEOs that get together, talk very openly, share strategies, actually eagerly and openly reach out to say, How can I help you? Um, and that's I think that's a unique as part of the CIA, a community that there's this willingness to say, Look, we're all in this together from a technology perspective. I mean, look, we all want to do well for our companies, but you're also trying to figure out how to make technology team stronger and you know it's a lot of the the same issues. It's how do I change the focus of and the perception of where I t fits into a business that it's not just a back office? It's not these systems, but it's actually becoming a very strategic, you know, Enabler, advisor, participant Helping to help, you know, can provide input. You can be that one of the first you know, Betas for your company if you're in a technology area and that's a change. There's a lot of companies who have always fascinated where it's like if you're a product and you have an I T. You're selling to those people, so pitch to them. If you can't sell to them, you're not gonna be successful. So I think it's just changing, evolving. You know some of those relationships and and that's a big deal and and you know, that's from the how you run your organization. There's that, you know, how do we make sure that the technologies were were all investing in our somewhat future proof and that they can evolve with us, not become inhibitors or, you know, box you into something that you can't kind of navigate through >> well, actually deliver on future proof. It's one of those marketing terms that is used by so many organizations delivering whatever kind of product. Same is with simple and seamless says We talk about this all the time. We did hear from customers wherever Green is concerned. You know, I said, non disruptive is how much of that goes from a marketing to reality and consistently heard about Piers ability to deliver their. But it's interesting and it's a refreshing, I think, to hear that you've experienced the changing role of the CEO to be collaborative versus he knows a lot of competition. And in tech, that's a refreshing The deer And I have an idea for you since you're so you're in such a habit to D'oh, it's good. What? You're gonna like this. I have an idea. Hash tag. Help Cathy Scale. Give them this video. Just so many pure customers all across the globe. >> Thank you. I will do that. I would. That's great advice. >> That's it. Easy to d'oh! D'oh! Well, Cathy's been great having you on the Cube. Thank you for sharing your perspective as there newish. See Io and how you went from here customer to running their i t. And congratulations on being part of the next decade of pure success. Thank you. Thank you for having our pleasure for day. Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> Welcome to this Special Cube conversation. We're here in Mountain View, California. Pure storages headquarters on cash for street were here in the arcade of the main building, one of six buildings here in downtown where Pure has their contingent of offices. On joint cab itself was a C i o a pure formerly many, many years of it and running T operations and right of other work clothes. Great to see you. Thanks for From the time >> Great. Thanks for having me. So we're in the >> arcade here. All the old school stand up video games, but our generation, when we have to play videogames standing up but kind of speaks to the culture of pure What's your role of pure What do you do and how long you've been here? >> Okay, so I've been here appear for just about five months and and it's been great. I came on board is the CEO and, as you know, all companies air facing their challenges, going forward, way have ours for scaling is this Business continues to grow so super excited to be here and spent a lot of fun so far. >> So about your career before pure, where were you and how long you worked there. >> I you know, I spent a better part of my current ATT and T Amazing Company and was there for over twenty one years. Had a variety of rules, primarily always in the technology sides. So everything from the from application side two operations infrastructure, Teo, Project Management, Teo Technology, Innovation And then the last few years was was spent working on a lot of our network strategy. So what are we doing as a, um, as a business to kind of transform a teen tea service provider network? And how does that a line from a cloud and a technology for what we have been doing some cases on on the side >> and you've been on both side of the table. You you were a customer of pure. Now you work. If you were running well, I t Here's a CEO. Try and try and keep this transformation going. What's your take on the industry right now? Because it's interesting times as you know it is transforming. You got security front center roles were changing. Got skills, gaps. You get the cloud with scale, a lot of change, >> you know, and it's interesting. That happens that both big companies and smaller companies, so the transition had eighty having those same challenges. They look different here, appear because we are a little over nine year old company, and as you start to look at, we have the real benefit of being a little bit younger on the tech front and being so close to, you know, obviously, being in Silicon Valley, you're so close to all the VCs and the startups. You get to have a little bit of different flavor, but, you know, it's a huge transition. I think that all of us in the industry are really faced with the challenges of not just trying to transform your teams and the work and what they're doing, but then also enable technology that's going to bridges from what we have to do with today, and where do we think we're going to go? So I don't think that is any different on any of the companies. I think we're all in that same boat of saying, How do you make sure I have technology that's gonna live longer than you know, a year, three years? And then how do we have a workforce that can continue to grow and develop because, you know, we want to be able to have our talent stay with us and make those journeys with us >> and one things we to a lot of Cuban Aries over the past ten years. Certainly in it changes been constant theme. But what's interesting is his economic changed and look of skill gas. But economics have changed, and then the time to value the big long projects used to take months and months years right now, shorten those solo cycles have been accelerated down two months and days. Sometimes Frank, can you come and reactive economics and then time to value. >> You know, I think economics are. They're always in the forefront of every company, especially publicly traded companies that, you know you want to make sure we're turning the right value to our shareholders, and that's an important aspect. But I think the more the more important part of it is just trying to make sure that you can make decisions that can outlive kind of a shorter economic window they maybe had would have done in the past. So I think that's where all of us in in the space of CIA rolls or trying to really evaluate. How do you do that? How do you make sure that you could make those transitions and not have next year on Leigh Foundation, But be part of it to help you make some of that shift >> and the evidence on workload. I've heard the word workload was a tag cloud. I'd probably say workload would be the biggest font because, you know, workloads would you mean applications that have been around for a while? But more and more applications are coming. The migrating workload. So the cloud on premise So a lot of emphasis on workloads these days >> is that putting >> pressure on it is putting pressure on the operations. How do you see that? That whole workload thing evolving? >> Yeah, you know, I definitely do. So, you know, one of the one of big initiatives I ran eighteen t was migrating a thousand of our strategic applications onto ah nonprime private cloud. And it was all about not just the economics, but also the efficiency and the enablement for the business to move faster, you know, at a lower cost point. So that always tends to be your kind of bottom line part, but I think is I've come into pure and has You're trying to figure out how do you evolve our workloads of very different. We are very in our applications, like very different. So companies have different profiles of whether it's an application or workload. I think the other is It's a hyper focused around the user experience with, you know, so not just the end customer, but also the employees experience and what happens So, you know, when you talk about workloads, it's not just applications that heir business functions. They're also about. How do you make sure that our employees are having that great experience because you want to have that so that they can help to, you know, grow us as well and be productive in their roles? >> I wantto askyou one of the talk tracks I have on my notes here about pure specifically. But more generically, workloads are dominating conversation, but also technology selection and personnel selection are also tied to workloads, and some have said to me pick the right cloud for the right work. We'LL pick the right tool for the job. You hear that a lot. >> You did. What's your >> thoughts on that? Because this seems a kind of model of wars. Little bit, because the old school was Here's my suppliers. You pick them, they're all stand in the hall, come in with this general purpose. But now, with customization mohr agility, it seems to be that workloads and selection of tech and people are tied together. So >> yeah, no, I think you're right. I think that, um you know, part of our challenge is figuring out and this is me, her. A lot of us don't get yourself locked in And to that old notion of, you know, what you would have seen, you know, back in the day is you Did you pick a vendor and you kind of right that through whatever the challenge he had, I think the vendor community has also recognized that's not really the model they want to be in either. They really want to be a partner. So now what's about figuring out what I consider enablement? So can I use you to work on or to be optimized for a certain type of function? But can I put my work load somewhere else on DH? Do it So that's when one of things I've been surprised, that's probably more rapid shift is it's not just about Can I do it all myself or on Prem or with these set of vendors? It's to say I want to be able to actually move across. So can I have the flexibility and being realistic? But she can't have you? No total flexibility, everything. But you can't start to be prescriptive about certain areas and saying these type of applications are these functions or these workloads. I could get the largest amount of flexibility, but the's I'm actually okay saying most optimized should go here, whether it's on Prem off Prem hybrid. I think that's what we'LL start to see. A lot of >> we see that the cloud conversation. We're going to talk with him, your folks, about this. But no one cloud could be great for a workload for another cloud for another workload. And that's multi cloud because you have a couple clouds, right? And that's the train that we're seeing. You dude >> absolutely saw it at a T. Same thing here, a pure we do some on Prem and we do some hybrid. We also do some hosted where we have our SAS provider host are the applications well and that actually then starts to get you into some other challenges that we have a night that you start to say. So what happens with my data, and what does that look like? Where is it going? How is it secure all those things that are so important as a business to make sure your customer in your employee's data is, you know, corn centric to >> final question for going to the talk trash. I've gotta ask you, being a veteran in the business. What is it, crazier now, then it wass ten, fifteen years ago in terms of work operations. Is it faster? What's your take on it if you look back the old way into the new ways that you know more of the same but just different kind of product and technologies, which you're >> probably in the unique role because I think it's super fun, I think that Theobald litt e to be able to transform your business and have the flexibility. I'm certainly being here in in this roll and, you know, nine half year old company. There's lots of opportunity to be completely flexible, and I think that part is really fun. I think that the challenge for some larger you know, companies who've been around hundred plus year old companies as those companies you know, have a challenge with saying I've got such a large embedded base and trying to be, you know, interoperable around, what what exists and where they want to go. I think a lot of us that were, you know, in these companies that are, like, pure we have, Ah, you know, kind of. I think it is a gift to be able to say Hey, this is really something we should be able to do How do we go do it and have the support to actually do it? So it's Ah, I think it probably depends on the part of the industry that you're in. There's definitely some challenges, and I think privacy is definitely, you know, kind of a backdrop. But I think is you think about that. There's workable solutions for as all cos they're trying to go through. I think it's just a matter of making it. You know, that commitment to say you know you can can be flexible and you can make the progress you're looking for. >> It seems to be more of a builder culture as well as your operational calls. That's right. You can build and operate, build, operate kind of a new kind of flywheel. >> Yeah, I think that's the That's the exciting part for it is, I think we've we have transitioned or we're in that mode that time period where, instead of just being a pure enablement for the business, it's really turning into How do you become a strategic partner? How how do you have that seat at the table where you're helping to say, How do we help your business? It's not just about paying out these applications. Here's our availability hears. I mean those air, what I consider table stakes. You gotta be able to do those things. Now it's about how can we help you? Actually, you know, improve what? Your trying Teo, you know, in the business side of it. So that's the That's the part I think is unique and different is that focus on helping Teo and you're not just enabled, but be that strategic partner to help. He had changed business. >> That's awesome. Couple talk trash. I want to get your thoughts on one is accelerating Conference, which is pure We've been following. The company was founded. Scott Deaton. First interview, I think, was the way he found company Washington success. Now they have a big customer conference. We have the sixteenth in September sixteen September that week. Check it out your first conference, you guys, we're introducing some new things. What's the buzz? What are you planning on for the conference >> yet? So you know, it's interesting cause such as someone who's coming out of, you know, the industry side of it. The thing that's hard is as the CIA or was trying figure out what's going to be the biggest bank for my my time, cause I can't can't go to everything. So I'm super excited. Babel Teo to attend the event. I think the uniqueness is it's focused on the customers so existing customers, but also prospects customers who are considering pure thie. Other unique thing that's happening this year is there is a very specific track around the executive side so that having the sea level conversations, you know, with some of our key leaders in our business and innovative thinkers and so It's kind of running the spectrum of be able to say, If you're coming on and you should all come if you're coming, you're going to be able to have the conversations that you're expecting out of sea level. That might look a little different than maybe someone who's trying to do innovation and in your team and what they're looking for. So whether it's you know, demos or workshops and thinks that you get your hands, you know, hands dirty on, I think that that's the you know, the excitement of all of it is it's it's kind of a multifaceted and it's, ah, it's a great opportunity connects with your peers and with other companies, be able to say, What are you doing? How do we learn from you? We do a lot of those kinds of things, I think in general, but I think when you can get focused and have a peer group that's in, ah, you know smaller type of venue where and it's not thousands at a you know, major major conference that's existing somewhere in the in the U. S. Or u know worldwide, then you can actually have those meaningful conversations with your peers to say, Here's the things I'm working on. How ve you done it? What are you doing so well, I think we're gonna enable all those type of conversations to take place. So I'm excited to be a lot of fuss. >> The objective of the sea level trackers. It's just CEOs, is it? See? So says that CX ohs. What's the focus? What's the objective? >> It is all of that. One of its so interesting is my CEO is actually going to be quizzing me and talking to me about what is they actually expected of a CEO? Because I think that as a zany sea level position, your you know, we have expectations of you know what we need to deliver. But there's also how you contribute to the business. So it's kind of all all facets of it. It's everything from, you know, understanding what the expectations are to Some also thought leadership around where technology's going trends, those type of conversations and being would have some round table conversations. Maybe industry peers, eso all those kind of aspect. So but all all those areas they're covered >> should be great event. Looking forward to it. >> Yeah, a lot of fine >> Cuban be there. Of course we'LL check us out We'Ll be broadcasting live. Okay, Second talk track Women Tech You're a woman Takes years and years in the business in a big focus over the past years, Accused men have a lot of interviews with the great women in tech. >> Where do you >> see this state of the sticks? The needles doesn't seem to be moving on the percentages, but there seems to be great mo mentum in real pros. Lot of mentoring, a lot of networking. You seeing women, VC firms evolving very rapidly seeing cohorts together. What's your take on women in Tech, where we are, What challenges was opportunities? >> Yeah, you know, So we actually, in the Silicon Valley we actually have. There's several forms that go on for women CEOs and events that were to be able to have some of those conversations. And what do we do? And I think it starts with all of us, you know, individually and a in our organization, so organically is to figure out, you know, how do you make sure everyone feels that they belong, whether it's, you know, women or it's any other diverse group of employees. We have to figure out how to make people feel connected and part of the team, and I think it starts with that. And that's for kind of every discipline. And you know that you can think of in a business in text. Specifically, I think the challenge for women is you tend to not want to be identified. As, you know, a woman in Tech. It's like I want to be evaluated for my compensate what I bring to the table, my thought leadership, my perspective on and I don't think that's you mean to women. I think that's just unique to people that we all want to be valued for what we contribute. I definitely think that is a, um, a general kind of population and technology. I have seen where it used to be that I was the only female for many, many years and meetings, whether it was that fender briefings or it was in different company forms. Uh, I've had some unique opportunity. Eighteen t was hugely focused on women in tech women and engineering all those disciplines coming to pure, super exciting that we're we also so small of a company relatively sized eighteen t We have, you know, women heir Geez, employee resource groups. We have women in engineering. We have limited night. So we have kind of the ability to get that mentoring in that coaching the support within the company. And I think that's really valuable. But to your point, I think we have to still do Mohr of connecting outside of our company, figuring out whether that's through, you know, the different universities to make sure that we're getting the pipeline coming in and then retaining. I think that's the other challenges. The number's probably won't change much because we still see a significant amount of women leaving the workforce at a certain point. Er there were staging their career, and we need to figure out, you know what? What's that draw? Why is that happening? So >> what's the technology impact? Because as technology becomes consumer, I just seeing Data Analytics to arm or big a range of topics and confidence is not just computer science or probably or whatever Lim Maura broader perspective that helping at all do you see that evolving, that getting any lift, increasing the population and competency levels, >> you know it's a great question. I think we've had a pretty strong I'LL say, run at women. Being in computer science, we haven't seen enough women going into leadership positions. I think this just kind of industry, you know, generic kind of comment. I think it definitely helps. The more that you have a broader range of skills and capabilities. I think it's what is more fascinating is we need more women in those roles because as you think about the problems that all of our businesses air trying to solve their, it's not one dimension. So if we only have attack our problems with one dimension, one skill set, we just start going to be prepared to be, Oh, it's gonna take us longer And are all of us want to be able to quickly solve the issues that are >> of a personal question put you on the spot? What's the big learnings for you? Looking back now that you've seen that you can share as a woman attack and you put your twenty three year old hat on, what would you do differently? If anything, if you're living in today's world, >> you know eso it's interesting at has asked this question before actually came to pure as I talked to a number of companies in the Valley and it was like, What would you tell your younger self? And I said one of them is not to be afraid, and I think that's so so many of us. Whether you know, male or female. Sometimes you get into a routine and you don't necessarily break out of it or change. And so you tend to maybe take a safer path or a safer direction. And I think if I was to think back you No one is. Don't be afraid and the other, I think, is I probably would have. I was probably naive Tio not realize that I was sometimes the only female, and so I just kind of worked as I didn't think that was a different shade IRT it mattered. And when I think about it now, I probably should have done more to do some of the networking that we're doing today. That might have helped. You know, we talk a lot about the difference between mentoring and sponsoring, and it really gets into that. There needs to be enough, you know, sponsors both male and and female who can help to, you know, not just developed but have the conversations, you know, Make sure that people are included. Those kind of having a voice at the table. And I was very fortunate. I worked under some amazing leaders, both male and female, who who made sure that I had a voice. But I you know, I'm not a timid flower anyway, So I wouldn't have you know, I'm not going to sit there and to sit back and not do it and not to speak up. But I think that's something that not everyone is this comfortable was speaking up and being okay. That maybe I'm not right or so I think that I would tell my younger son Don't be afraid. And the second is to doom or Teo help get other others who maybe don't feel as if they belonged much. Teo, be able to have that. That same voice >> possible. Congratulations. You're awesome. And I'm excited for the event with you, >> you have to be a lot of fun. >> Okay, Next talk track. You were a customer of pure before you joined the company. Yes, you're t you were You know you have the keys to the kingdom. All the vendors pitching you You have big infrastructure, run tons and tons of work loads on DH. This is what, six, seven years ago here was in the growth phase. Now they're public company and much larger experience. But back then you took a risk on a technology. Tell us about that story because you made a big bet. Did it? Work actually worked out. You're here. I'm sure that he still has pure detail. The story? >> Yes. So first it starts with, You know, I had amazing team at a great team of folks who didn't want to accept the status quo, what was happening in the stores storage industry. And so as a CZ, we were hearing, you know, like you said, the pitches about what's due. What's different? Um, they were willing to stand up and say, Hey, you know what I think we need to look at this company, and, you know, it is hard when you are, you know, kind of that time I would say Pierre was somewhat of a unicorn in the sense that you try to have a somebody who's that small, non private, probably health company toe work with a big behemoth like tea. There's a lot of different things, whether it's contractual, you know, the legal, that decency is all that's having put aside the, you know, all of the technology. It's all of that That's really hard for companies to navigate. Pure had an amazing technology, and what happened is they came in and they said, Hey, this is what we can do. We can transform your business is not just about the economics will prove you that part, but we can actually help you to deliver faster for your application teams. We can help you with all these areas and and we could do it all within like two weeks. So the key was being able to stand up and say I'm going to do this and then prove it in this very small window because when you're in a large enterprise, you often you don't have unlimited resource is very constrained of. It's not a different that it started, but you're very limited. Resource is welcome to try to run big scale and so they were able to prove out everything they said, and then plus more. It was things like we started seeing efficiencies in the data center. We started to see that things like that where we thought we're going to have to expand and buy, you know, additional ports. We were able to not have to do it. So there was a lot of these, like side benefits that we weren't expecting. We all those Plus we asked for. So we did. We took a bet on Pure. They were a great, innovative team to work with. And, you know, he's had it, you know, their legacy is ah, very much innovation. And so it kind of was that match to say we need to re and companies who can help us to continue to innovate. >> We little skeptical at first, but we can do in two weeks. >> Yes. So it's almost like a bet. You go. All right, let's get you to do it. We'Ll see how it works in two weeks. So and that's s o they came in. It was all proved out. So we way actually, you know, move forward And you know, today a t and T is you know, hundreds of race, which is, you know, a very large footprint for any company to have with size. And it spans, you know, production application, Tier one applications to things that are specific use cases. So it kind of spans a large. >> Not a lot of war stories around. Critical failures, either. You said you had some successes with them before you came on camera. Yeah. Share that story is the storage. Is one those things where he was going to have something that might go down? The question is, how severe is the problem? What was some of the experiences you have? >> Yeah. You know, I can say that. You know, I left a team t last last summer. So up through that point, we had not had any several announces. So when you think of a large company, it's not unusual to have incidents outages. I mean, that that tends to happen just with the size of your footprint. Um, t was very successful, working with pure on, having essentially having a product that had big stability. And we didn't see those outages and not just on running it, but actually doing the non disruptive upgrades. So the ability to actually take the technology, do the next generation and not have any outages. That's pretty unusual for for any company tau experience. And so I looked at us from a scale highly unusual, but that's that was success. >> Great success. Okay, finally, you're here pure now, your CEO not as big as a T and T was still public company and they have a lot of employees. They're maturing as a company. You're running pure at your house. You can't unless you're doing a bake off internal assessment. How using pure. Now, how's it going? What's the share? Some of the architectural details without giving away any secrets. What's it like? And what you guys doing this innovative. >> So, you know, we are. We are much smaller organization, obviously. Then you know where I live just left. But it's really important for us to have that same innovation and capabilities we actually use pure we. But we use both flash array. We use flash blades of both of our you know, I'll say premiere products. We also use pure one, which is kind of the the telemetry visibility allows you to do what if analysis looked to see how you're doing for capacity perspective. So we actually use, um are you know, three of our primary products to actually run our daily our data warehouse, and then we are doing some of it just to be able to do some of our security. So we actually run a splunk in tableaux and using those type of tools, those capabilities, we run them on our environments and were able to do a lot of things that the feedback that we're getting is like, Oh, my gosh, we can't believe that you guys were able to do this. We have a very, very lean ight organization. So to do some of the things we're doing from a security analytics and, you know, threat, detections and all that, those are things that aren't very common for a lot of companies are we're all trying to be better on it and were able to use our own technology to kind of help substantiate what we're trying to solve for that's so super exciting. >> That's awesome. Final point on the CEO perspective. Great to have you and get the CEO perspective again. Bullets a customer and then working up your CEO is out there right now are challenged with transformation. Digital transmissions like buzz word that's been kicked around for years. But now you starting to see the robber hitting the road. Really? Development pressure, modernisation, run app, development. See, I see the pipe lining to multi cloud hybrid cloud. All this is now pretty much got some visibility into architectural decisions. What do you think is the bigger It's callous facing CEOs today in terms of, you know, thinking about the holistic, you know, five ten year horizon as they start to make investments and think about either aging out or contain arising preexisting workloads to cloud native APS and on premise giving me all your thoughts. >> Yeah. You know, I think that the kind of boils down to a couple aspects. One of them is, you know, module ization of your applications. That's why containers ations become such a big deal. Being able to do things like, you know, have your data separate from your application and not have everything so integrated at that level where you then are getting somewhat confined. You have issues with in I have to have this application running in this location. I also need to have the data has to be, you know, coexisting with it and so you run with all these constraints. So I think that for depending on the age of your organisation, that the first challenge is trying to figure out how do I start, Tio, you almost break apart my application of iron, my infrastructure. So I have more ability to have more modularity between what needs to happen and where it needs to happen. So I think to me, that's the That's one of the biggest aspects were, you know, super fortunate, because because we're a big sash shot. Most of our applications were dependent on our venders for the US Ask providers to have kind of worked through some of those issues, but that's that's one aspect. I think the second is the ability to navigate between, you know, on permanent prints. So the hybrids solution is really I don't see that going away. I think that all of us are struggling with the whole notion of whether it's the economics. It's the ability to like you, said move workload to the right location for the right optimization, the right tooley, et cetera. And so I think it's that flexibility. You can't get any of that if you don't have the first part done. And then when you start talking about your like your digital strategy, none of that works when you start wanting to get into, like, a A and m o until you have some of those things done and you put that data strategy in place. So you then have that ability have the threat across your whole, you know, ecosystem. And I think that's what our challenge, >> an automation, is key. But you gotta automate manual test. You have people to do it. Then you got a strange way to make that. So the skill gap stills always gonna be there. Right? Kathy, Thanks for Spend the time sharing your insight here on the cube conversation. Really appreciated. Absolutely. Thank you for >> having me >> here. Cube culture here. Pure storages headquarters in Mountain View, California. John Korea. Thanks for watching

>> Life from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. And I'm joined by Kathleen Natriello. She is the vice president and the head of IT, digital design at Bristol Myers Squibb. And Shalu Chadha, senior technology services lead at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on theCube. >> Sure. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we're going to talk about Bristol Myers Squibb's journey to the cloud today, but I want. Bristol Myers Squibb is a household name, but I would love you to just start out, Kathleen, by telling our viewers a little bit about Bristol Myers Squibb. Just how big a global pharma company you are. >> Sure. We're a global company, as you said. We have about 23,000 employees all over the world. And we're very focused on our immuno oncology therapies. And the way that they work is that they boost the immune system to fight cancer. So it's a really exciting development that we've had over the years. >> And so what was it, sort of, in the trajectory of Bristol Myers Squibb, that made you realize, as an organization, we need to do things differently? What challenges were you facing? >> So, we're very science focused in terms of developing treatments for our patients. And so our highest priority was our scientists' productivity. And so we started our cloud journey about 10 years ago. And our initial focus was on leveraging burst computing in AWS, which enabled us to spin up enough capacity for our scientists to do research with very large volumes of data. That's one of the things about biopharma. We use very large volumes for genomics research. >> And also, with this partnership, using AWS, you also partner with Accenture. So, can you describe a little bit, Shalu, how the partnership evolved? >> Right. And so that journey that Kathy mentioned, We've been part of that journey for the last two years now. And I think it's this nice partnership between AWS, BMS, and Accenture. And the teams have gone on with a lot of quick successes and early successes. And I think, going forward, the focus is really now businesses is going to look for a lot more demand and agility. Clouded adoption is going to be key in how we actually expand on that. And I know we're talking amongst us to say, how do we get there faster now? >> A little less conversation, a little more action please. >> Yes. (inaudible speech and laughter) >> Exactly. So, let's talk about this journey. So you're not only migrating existing applications, you're also building your own applications. >> Yes. >> What's the, sort of the wisdom behind that strategy? >> A couple of things. So I mentioned earlier that we started our journey with our scientists and we've continued because that's where AWS really delivers significant value for Bristol Myers Squibb. So, what we have done is implemented several AWS cloud services that enable our scientists to use machine learning, artificial intelligence, a lot of computational approaches and simulations that significantly reduce the amount of time it takes them to do an experiment, as well as the cost. Because they no longer have to use actual physical material, or patients, or investigators. They can do it all through simulation and modeling, which is exciting. >> So, I mean, we all know that the drug discovery process takes a long time, and it's tedious, um, cumbersome. So can you actually bring it back down to earth a little bit and say, what have you seen? What are your scientists? In terms of how the drug discovery process is going. >> Yeah. Our scientists are our biggest advocates of the cloud and the capabilities it delivers. And they will report back to us that they are doing things with machine learning and artificial intelligence with these simulations, that they're doing in a few hours, that used to take them weeks and months. And so that's how it's really shortening that cycle. >> And are the patients feeling the benefits yet, too? >> The patients will feel the benefits with our focus on clinical trials. And so, being able to speed up a clinical trial is very helpful. And both from the patient experience, as well as the investigators. >> Shalu, can you talk about some of the other innovation and automation capabilities? >> Yeah. So, BMS is really on this really exciting journey, and now that they've, like Kathy said, extended some of those capabilities and actually building and enabling for the scientists, of the commercial, the brand sites. It's now about, really, what do you do next and how you bring that next wave of innovation. And so, what's been nice at Bristol Myers Squibb and the partnership we have with Accenture here, is really looking at taking some of the learnings we had in the back office, in the finance and the procurement. Where we've actually brought a lot of process efficiency through our bots taking some of that learnings and bringing that across in many other different ways. And now we have bots across legal, compliance, and moving into the clinical area that adverse events. And we're looking at really that part which is how do you actually get quicker with how the patients are going to see both responses to the adverse events, as well as how do you actually accelerate the clinical trial process. And all of those innovations are really possible with what Kathy has set up in her organization. And actually having that digital acceleration competency and be able to take this span enterprise. >> One of the things that's so interesting about these partnerships is how you work together. >> (in unison) Yes. >> And is it that you're focusing on the science and Accenture is thinking about the technology? I mean, are you, sort of, two different groups? Or how are you coming together to collaborate and build a relationship? >> I really see it as three groups. So it's Bristol Myers Squibb that's focused on science as well as the technology. And if I take an example of how that partnership works, when we were doing our migration to the cloud, the more aggressive plan that we have in place right now, Amazon partnered with us on a migration readiness program. And that enabled us to move as much as 400 plus workloads into the cloud and to other locations. And then Accenture partnered with us, as well, to actually move the applications and migrate them to the cloud and the two other locations. So, I really see it as a three way partnership. And part of the way, one of the reasons it's so successful is it's not just BMS partnering with Accenture, and BMS partnering with Amazon, But it's Amazon and Accenture partnering together. And they would come up with ideas on here's what we think will make BMS even more successful. >> And how, and how is that? Is it because you were really grasping their business challenges? Or, I mean, how are you able to come up with? You're not a life science person. >> Right. >> It's, how are you doing that? >> It's a good question, and I think when I reflect on what I experience with other clients, I think what's so tremendously making us successful here is everything is about interest based. And it's about how we start the conversation. The patient in the center. And then it's about who's interests are we serving. Let's be clear. And let's try and try trigress into what's the solution that actually needs that. So, I think, whether, Kathy mentioned it in the cloud cumulus work, or even with the SAPS four journey right now. It's the combination of AWS, BMS, and Accenture in that journey of how we going to solve this together. Those critical and complex programs. >> Kathy, you said that scientists were some of your biggest advocates for going cloud native. I'm curious about the rest of the work force. I mean, has it been, sometimes introducing new technologies and new ways of doing things can cause consternation among your employees. >> Yeah., but in my organization, we bring a lot of change to the rest of the company. And your right. Sometimes it's well received. But I think when it is well received, is when across the company they can see the productivity gain with our robotics process automation. At a digital workforce, people are able to have, they are able to get a lot more done. And so there is acceptance of that. And very often, the business functions are the ones that introduce the new technologies because they're really interested in it and curious. So it works out well. >> So they're getting more done so >> Yes >> So then they're more satisfied with their work and life >> Yes >> And, exactly. So tell our viewers a little bit more about what's next for this partnership, for this relationship, in terms of new technologies. In terms of what you hope to be able to accomplish in the years to come. >> So, I can start. I really think that's what is next for us is to move a little faster. So, in our cloud journey, as I mentioned, we started 10 years ago and then, we've build on what we've learned. So, as an example, we put our commercial data warehouse into a Amazon Redshift. And then that laid the foundation for us to do, for example, rapid data labs. We started by building some data lakes in HR and R and D. And then, by the time we got to doing that for manufacturing, we did it serverless. And so we've had a nice progression based on learning and going the next step. But I think, we're to the point where the technology's evolving so quickly we can move a lot faster and get the benefits faster. So for me, that's what I view as what's next. >> Shalu, anything? >> Yeah. I would just add that I think analytics set the core. I think there is such a strong foundation set here that now it's about how are we going to extrapolate from there. And really look at bot machine learning and what that could do for us. And that, and we will take a lot from what we've learned here today about actually evolving that journey. And I think the best part is the foundation is set strong. And now it's about accelerating into those specific business areas as well. So I would say analytics and really extending our machine learning capabilities. >> So move faster, analytics machine learning. Great. So we're going to be talking about it next year's summit. Well, Kathy and Shalu, thank you so much for coming on theCube. This was a lot of fun. >> Yes. It was. >> (in unison) Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Madrid everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vallante and I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. This is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. Parvesh Sethi is here, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the global client services at HPE Point Next. Parvesh thanks for very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Dave: Last time we saw you, you were 30 days into the job. >> That's right. >> Maybe 45 days. So how's the first six, seven months been? >> It's been busy. It's actually been very good. I administered the transformation change that's taking place within the company. It's actually been really good to also working with the clients on the hybrid IT journey side of the house. And since last we spoke, we also did the CTP acquisition, which has been very well received as well. >> Well I love it, when you guys go and talk about transformations to customers. We're experts. >> Parvesh: Yes. >> We live this. >> Parvesh: Live this everyday. >> Does that enter into the discussions with your customers? It must right? >> Yeah I think it gives us a lot of credibility. Especially when you take a look at the journey they're on. And we talk a lot about hybrid IT today, making it simple. And one of the things we always talk to them about is that hybrid IT is not just infrastructure cloud. You really have to take a look at the full spectrum of the services that had to be delivered. It could be as a service providers, could be subscribing to a platform, and hosting it on-prem, off-prem, private dedicated infrastructure, or public cloud. Just a mix of those and being able to decide as to what are the characteristics that you should look at, and what will decide as to what goes into public cloud, private cloud, or where should those services come from. >> What do you tell the skeptics? You know the, why should I do hybrid cloud? Why don't I just put everything in the cloud? Do you get those questions, or is it more customers saying hey, help me with my hybrid problem? What's the-- >> Almost every single client meeting that I've been in. Everyone acknowledges the world is hybrid IT. And I have not met a single client yet who says all of their workloads are going into public cloud. I think a lot of it depends on what they want to achieve. If they want a lot of elasticity and if they need SLAs, or if they want to bring the workload back in, security compliance or organizational cultural governance processes, performance characteristics. A lot of those factors come into play as to deciding what goes where. And I think almost everyone says that it's never going to be 100% this or that just based on the characteristics that would really dictate where the workload or the application says. >> And that's the characteristics of the data. Is that fair? 'Cause it used to be, oh security. And you know public cloud, gives you fine security. Maybe not exactly the way you want it done, but is it more the realization about, you just can't move all the data into the cloud? Or you can't force your business into the cloud? What are customers saying there? >> I think part of it also comes into, for example, governance as well. If there's HIPAA compliance workloads as an example, that may dictate your decision in a certain way. But you're right though, I mean security used to be one of the big concerns, but it's more about now a person has decided they want to move a certain workload over, it's really more about how do you get them comfortable, how do you de-risk that move? And this is where thinking through the journey roadmap really becomes critical. But just because of that one aspect, it's not necessarily stopping people from moving, but it's really baking that into the design criteria as to how you move it. >> Well while we're on security, I mean, in the last five years it's obviously become a board level topic. People have I think come to the recognition. Maybe the recognition, maybe the spending hasn't shifted, but the mindset's shifted that we can't just create a moat, you know, they're gonna get in. Once they get in we have to respond. We need analytics and response mechanisms and so. How are they coming to you for help? What are they asking you for, and how are you helping? >> So I think it certainly comes into more into place can not be an afterthought. It's really more about security in and the governance has to be kind of baked in from the front end of it. So everything that we do, whether it's any solution that we're doing from IoT perspective all the way to the hybrid IT, from an architecture blueprint perspective we have made sure the security's front and center of everyone of those designs as well as the discussion criteria with the client. And so when you start looking at it's not about security partial assessment. It's also kind of looking at designing security from a, you know, architecture blueprint perspective. And making sure that if somebody's talking about hybrid IT architecture or an IoT use case, that security's front and center of the design criteria. >> If you think about the challenges that your sales, well let's step back. If you think about the challenges that everybody has at conceiving of how best to associate data, workload, and cloud implementation. Hybrid, on-premise, off-premise, wherever it is. There are, you have to have a common framework, what used to be called a computing model. A way of thinking of how you address the problem. That your sales people has to have, your support people have to have, you have to have, your customer has to have. Are there like two or three things that you're telling your people to look forward, or look for and working with their customers to help provide those clues. So crucial to getting everybody on the same page early as to where workloads are gonna end up. Where data is gonna end up. >> That's a great question, and one of the things that we're making sure that our folks are not just talking about the hardware piece of it. It's really more about before the hardware discussion takes place, making sure that we completely align on the workload strategy. As part of the workload strategy, you know we will do workshops, and we'll make sure that we totally understand in terms of what is it they're trying to accomplish in terms of the workload migrations. And before we even get to the migration topic, we really go through this criteria in terms of assessing the workloads. Which workloads are more suited to go into cloud environment. And in areas which we may need to re-architect the application or re-write it. We also kind of put those into a specific category and take a look at making sure that is the performance criteria more, is it security is it more about the TCO, and more and more you're starting to see it's not really a brokerage discussion. It's really more of strategic sourcing discussion because you're more and more are starting to talk about what is the best source to get the service from. Because there's no shortage of choices that they have today where they can provide these services from. So it's really more of about understanding what they're trying to achieve. And then understanding the sourcing policy. Understanding the alignment between the IT and the governance piece of it, the whole business side of it, and the IT side of it. And then it's really more about the supply chain management. You heard about One'Sphere today. But it's really more about how do you take this complexity out of the hybrid IT environment, and making sure that you can provide the automation and that capability to provide it as easy of environment for them to have a single plane of glass. So those are the key pieces of the framework that we try to make sure everyone is on same page. >> You mentioned cloud technology partners. We heard about One'Sphere today, that's obviously the CTP is part of that announcement. Small company, but very high quality customer base. It's very specialized. Take us through the rationale for the acquisition, kind of what the value is to your customers, and where it's headed. >> I think last time when we spoke we talked about our overall strategy. One of the key pillars is really around making hybrid IT simple. And we know when we talk about hybrid IT it cannot be just the on-prem part of the storyboard. You have to talk about the public cloud side of it as well. And this is where the CTP acquisition comes into play to really plug a hole. I mean we had some capability in house, but not to the extent of what CTP brings to the table. I mean they are premiere partner to AWS, premiere partner to Google, silver partner to Microsoft Azure. And so having that kind of credibility and the recognition in the US and North America, certainly gives us more credibility with our customers talking about the hybrid IT story. And then taking that skillset, assets, and the IP, we want to take that and leverage of our channel community, as well as our install base, as well as of our capabilities in Europe as well Asia, and help scale that globally is really a way how we're gonna leverage this skillset and asset set. >> So we're in beautiful Madrid, Spain at the EMEA Discover. Cloud is a global phenomenon, but it's not uniform. From your perspective of providing services to customers that have global needs as well as local needs, take us through how Europe is different. Start from the observation that we've got North American cloud players, public cloud players, we've got Asian cloud players, we have not an obvious European cloud player. How is it different on a global basis, and what is HP doing to mass those differences, HPE doing, to mass those differences from your global and local customers. >> So I think one of the things you are finding here the need, and we talked about this earlier today, the need for as a consumption models. And you're seeing that the trend globally. And more and more people, more and more customers are talking about not wanting to necessarily own, but how do they pay for what they use. And so one of the things we do is from a framework perspective we've really deployed a very consistent framework, uniformed transformational framework, UTF. And we did apply for a patent for it as well. But the idea there is to leverage a common methodology, common framework to take a client through in terms of how to go about this cloud journey. Everyone is on a different place in terms of the cloud adoption, their digital transformation journey. But through the experiences that we have, I mean we do well over 10,000 engagements a year. Leveraging that IP, we have really built like full interconnected journey roadmaps. And so a client, you can take any client, whether a service provider or enterprise, they're somewhere on that journey roadmap. And they may be in a different place, but being able to talk to them, leveraging that common IP and say look, this is where you're at today, here's the roadmap that you can take to get to your desired end state. And that has really resonated with the clients. And if they truly don't want to own the infrastructure, and they just want to pay as you go, this is where the whole HPE, GreenLake announcements have really come into play. So I think those teams when you take a look at the performance characteristics, organization governance issues. Because one of the things that we find is 70% plus of the clients that we talk to, they have not been able to really maximize the full potential of what hybrid IT gives them. And one of the major hurdles we see, and doesn't matter whether you talk to a client in North America or EMEA or APJ. It's really the lack of focus on management of change. It's the organizational, the cultural barriers that get in the way. It's the competencies, the organizational processes that get in the way. So those are the pieces we want to make sure as part of the UTF framework, IT is just one of the principles. And of the other domains, management of change is one of the key elements that we see, which is common across all the client base that we talk to. >> When you go back to the early part of this decade, and you observe sort of the big, remember the big data meme it sort of exploded in 2010, 2011, 2012. It ended up being a very, complex of course, but also very services led, engagements because it was so complex. IoT is somewhat similar, it's very data oriented, it's very complex. So talk about services and the relationship with IoT, the opportunity for you and how you're helping add value to customers. >> Now that's a great question also Dave. I think when you take a look at the IoT. I think we're starting to get past that half cycle. And a lot players will talk about they got hundred plus proof of concepts going in their lab, but they just have not been able to bring it into the mainstream. And so one of the things we're talking to clients about is starting to move away from the terms like proof of concept. Focus on proof of value. Because at the end of the day, if you cannot help your line of business accelerate time to value, no matter how great of a concept you have, it's never going to see the day of light. So this is where the point next services really come into play with the whole advisory led motion because it's still very much a services led motion today. Working with the clients around how they can really help shorten the time to value. Accelerate time to value. And if we can take even one or two use cases they have in their labs today. And show them how they can get to 50, 60 million dollars of savings like one of the oil and gas customers we were just talking to. Same thing we see in the retail manufacturing. Is just taking some of the spoof points, and say this is how you can actually bring them into the mainstream, and make sure they also start to have the business alignment. That's one of the common things we hear from the CXOs here this week is the business alignment between the IT and the OT side if they're talking to the IoT use cases. Because without the business alignment, believe me you're not gonna be able to get the management of change that you're seeking to derive. >> So do you expect or are you seeing yet new business models. You were talking about the cost savings, but what about sort of the new business models emerging from those discussions and opportunities. >> Definitely I mean if you take a look at whether it's the hospitality suite, you know Kathy talked about main stage about even the retail experience that we're just starting to be very different. So when you look at the new value that's being created, you know a lot of us who travel to get here, when we check into the hotel, a number of places now, you can check in digitally, 24 hours in advanced. You never have to stand in line for a queue. Don't have to flash up your credit card because the hotel's have really now started to leverage the digital transformation where 24 hours in advanced you can check in online. They'll give you a digital key so on your phone when you walk into the hotel, as soon as you're within a threshold you get onto your wifi network and you see a personalized message. And it has also the directions to your room. And when you get to your room, you use the digital key to get in. Think about the possibilities it creates to launch new services for not just the hotel, but it's also affiliates, the partners for pushing specific targeted advertising offers while you're in Madrid here or some other place. So you're starting to see these new value creations even though behind the scenes you still have them integrate a lot of their digital critical business systems whether it's CRM, reservation systems, or smart buildings. You have to still make sure the security's in play. And so it is really you checking in, not someone else. As well as making sure the room is available. But it's really more focused on the business outcome. And this is one of the things that you're seeing even in a portfolio shift, it's no longer talking about some implementation services, integration services. When we sit down with a client it's really more focused around what outcome are we delivering. It's not talking about, look we can sell you x numbers of servers, or we can sell you devices. More about here's the business outcome that we'll deliver for you. And this is what you're gonna be able to do with that additional value creation. >> Do you mean I might be able to not have to wait in line a half hour when I check into a Las Vegas hotel in the future? >> Parvesh: Absolutely. >> Peter: No that will never happen. (laughing) >> No definitely, I mean you see improvements every single year. And hopefully, whether you walk into a retail shop, be able to experience differently walking from home into a branch store and what that experience will look like, it'll be very very different than what some of the people experience today. >> Lots of changes coming. All sort of based on the data, Parvesh thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to see you. >> Absolutely it's great to be here, thank you so much. >> You're welcome alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest Dave Vallante for Peter Burris. This is theCUBE, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. (electronic music)